Switching to Codeberg
Wed, 28 May 2025
Technology, Opinion
=====================

I have recently switched away from GitHub as my codeforge to
Codeberg which includes the hosting of this blog. In this brief
post, I will cover my reasons for switching and briefly describe
the process.

I have been using GitHub at least since 2016 (possibly earlier,
I was using a different account at the time, so and cannot see
exactly when I joined). Back then, I wanted to host some code I
was working on, and GitHub was (and still is) the most popular
choice for doing so. Since then however, many things have
changed, notably the acquisition by Microsoft, the increasing
social-media-lisation, and now: The AI [1].

Firstly, let me talk about the acquisition of GitHub by
Microsoft. At the time -- in 2018 -- I didn't care much about
this change. I was still using Microsoft products occasionally
for university, and I believe I still had a Google account at
the time as well. Since then, I have increasingly switched away
from big-tech, but GitHub's Microsoft ownership was seemingly
stored in a bit of a blind-spot in my brain, even though
migrating away from it would have been much easier than many of
the products I *did* switch away from (Such as Windows, Office,
GDrive, GooglePlay, etcetera).

Then there is the fact that GitHub is increasingly becoming more
of a social media platform. At first, many of these features
were nice. Stars give you a good idea of how popular a project
is, and following people can be a nice way to discover new
projects. However, too many *behaviours* carried over from
social media as well, such as follow-back and like-farming.
Besides, at the end of the day, I do not want GitHub to be my
social media, I want it to host my code and allow me to work
with others. When I have to star a project before my PR will be
considered,,, we have lost the path.

Lastly, there is the AI. Now, I do not refer just to AI in the
sense which it has recently taken (ie: LLMs). Rather I mean both
GitHub bots and the Copilot LLM. Popular GitHub bots such as
stale-issue bots completely mess up issue threads. They
encourage a behaviour where people periodically `bump' an issue
to keep it active. The aforementioned star-farming is made
possible with a bot. Once again, these are *behaviours* which
frustrate me, but they are *enabled* by GitHub's features. It
also doesn't help that GitHub -- as the most popular codeforge
-- has the lowest-common-denominator of users. When GitHub
recently introduced a LLM service which would write issues for
you, I decided it was about time to leave. I can already see the
future wherein this feature enables bad issue etiquette, and I
don't want to be here for it[2].

So I switched. I archived all my repositories which are not
using GitHub actions, and migrated active repositories to my
Codeberg account. I have used Codeberg for some time already to
comment on projects that I used[3] and I really like the
interface and featureset (I cannot say the same for GitLab or
Sourcehut respectively). The migration process was mostly
painless, with the biggest time-sink being the archiving on the
GitHub-side.

I hope to stick around on Codeberg for a while, and perhaps to
also keep it more professional than by GitHub portfolio
(interests, standards, and personalities tend to change over the
course of a decade). In fact, this transition has occurred at
roughly the same time as my learning of the `go' programming
language which I will write about shortly and I hope to write
some larger projects in which are not convenient to write in
shell or python.

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[1]: I should also mention that GitHub being a US-based company
     also makes me less than thrilled given the current state of
     things.
[2]: In fact, this is not really a `future' at all, it has
     already been happening for some time. The difference is
     that the process is now more streamlined and sanctioned by
     Microsoft.
[3]: Notably the excellent `foot' terminal emulator

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