- Introduction — The "I left GitHub" posts are multiplying
- What is actually driving the move
- What Codeberg and Forgejo actually give you
- What you actually give up by leaving
- Closing
- References
Introduction — The "I left GitHub" posts are multiplying
A HowToGeek article, "Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives," has been making the rounds on GeekNews and Hacker News. A handful of well-known projects really have left, and individual "here is why I moved" write-ups keep landing behind them.
Let's set the balance first. GitHub is not sinking. By the same article's own numbers, it still adds roughly one new user per second, hosts more than 600 million repositories, and logged close to a billion commits in 2025 alone. "Exodus" is plainly an overstatement. And yet the trend is worth taking seriously, because the reasons people give are not vague grievance — they are specific, and most of them are new to 2025 and 2026. This is not a GitHub-bashing piece; it is an attempt to separate what is real from what you actually trade away.
What is actually driving the move
The first factor is reliability. Third-party outage tracking (IncidentHub) counts 48 major outages and roughly 112 hours of total downtime over the year from May 2025, with Actions the single most outage-prone service. That fatigue is what tipped the terminal emulator Ghostty (April 2026) and the Zig language (November 2025) into leaving. Jonas Hietala goes further and points at code-quality problems, like a busy-wait loop in the Actions runner, as part of the pattern.
The second is ownership. In August 2025, GitHub was folded into Microsoft's CoreAI division and the independent CEO role disappeared. The departing Thomas Dohmke had already framed 2025 in stark terms in a widely quoted remark: embrace AI, or leave the career. For Jorijn Schrijvershof, who moved to Forgejo, the deciding issue was explicitly not the outages — it was that he does not own the platform his work sits on.
The third, and the most concrete 2026 trigger, is a flip in the AI-training default. Per Jorijn, on April 24, 2026, GitHub switched to opt-out AI training for Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users, with no repository-level switch. In practice that means a maintainer cannot stop their code from feeding training data whenever a contributor works with Copilot enabled. Gentoo settled onto Codeberg on February 16, 2026, citing continuous pressure to use Copilot on its repositories — the same concern from a different angle.
Layered on top is a jurisdiction worry: even with EU data residency, US legal reach under FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act still applies. HowToGeek also mentions GitHub's past ICE contract (criticized back in 2019) and older licensing objections from the GNU camp, but those read less as the 2026 trigger and more as long-standing political friction.
What Codeberg and Forgejo actually give you
Codeberg is run by Codeberg e.V., a nonprofit registered in Germany. Members elect the board, budgets are public (the 2025 budget passed 88-0-1), and the hosted instance carries more than 300,000 repositories. The software running underneath it is Forgejo.
Forgejo is written in Go and relicensed to GPLv3+ in August 2024 — a deliberate move, learned from the Gitea fork, to resist future commercial capture of the codebase. And it is self-hostable. The first impression departing developers keep reporting is simply that it feels fast.
Self-hosting is not free, though. Jorijn's setup is a good illustration: a single Intel NUC with 64GB of RAM running Forgejo v15 LTS, PostgreSQL 17, and Traefik in Docker. That part is modest. CI is where it gets serious. A self-hosted runner executes other people's code, so it needs real isolation, and he stacked five layers of it: a KVM virtual machine, gVisor as the default runtime, weekly destructive rebuilds, an nftables egress filter, and scope-bound tokens. That is the true invoice behind "leaving GitHub."
This is not a fringe choice, either. In April 2026 the Dutch government launched code.overheid.nl, a self-hosted Forgejo instance, on the same logic — owning your government code infrastructure and running fully open-source software without vendor gatekeeping. At the individual level, Jonas Hietala takes a hybrid path: self-hosting Forgejo as his primary interface while mirroring to Codeberg as the public-facing home.
What you actually give up by leaving
The biggest loss is network effects and discoverability. The gravitational pull of 600 million repositories is something no alternative can fake. The top Hacker News comment is blunt about it — you cannot line up a handful of meaningful repositories against hundreds of thousands and call it a trend. Contributors still expect github.com, and the projects that leave end up leaning on redirects and archived pointers.
The economics of CI matter too. GitHub's free Actions minutes for open source effectively act as a subsidy to stay put. Self-hosting buys faster CI (one report cites 40 minutes dropping to 10) and unlimited runner minutes, but the operating burden lands entirely on you. On top of that, Forgejo Actions — in Jorijn's phrasing — aims for familiarity, not compatibility.
# Forgejo Actions: familiar, but not compatible (per Jorijn)
permissions: blocks -> silently ignored
actions/checkout@v6 -> authenticated checkout broke, pin v5
actions/upload-artifact@v4 -> needs the Forgejo fork
OIDC workflow syntax -> differs from GitHub
Dependabot -> absent, use Renovate instead
Codespaces / Apps marketplace / Advanced Security / 24-7 support -> none
The alternatives have their own scaling pains. Codeberg has gone through stretches of poor performance under sustained DDoS attacks (Jonas), and its anti-scraping defenses (Anubis/iocaine) have been reported to block legitimate users through false positives (HN). Nonprofit capacity is finite. That is why even Jorijn draws an honest line: do not self-host if you lack the infrastructure capacity, depend heavily on GitHub-specific features, value contributor discovery over ownership, or cannot run a runner securely. The broad Hacker News consensus lands in the same place — today's departures reflect principle and ideology more than a superior alternative forcing anyone's hand.
Closing
So the real question is not "is GitHub sinking" — it is not. The real question is "who owns your infrastructure, and what is the cost of finding out you don't." The axis is reach versus ownership. Codeberg and Forgejo hand back ownership, governance, and speed in exchange for reach and convenience.
For a solo developer or a project that prizes independence and can genuinely run its own infrastructure, this move is becoming a realistic option. For a project that lives on contributor discovery and the Actions ecosystem, the same move is an expensive invoice. The honest posture is this: take the stated reasons seriously, refuse to inflate the trend, and measure — for yourself — exactly how much you depend on GitHub.
References
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A HowToGeek article, "Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives,...