Sure, I know a lot of projects have been on GH since before MS bought it, but they’ve owned it for quite a while now, so we really should be seeing better migration out by now, no?
Codeberg is nonprofit which seems more in the spirit of the Linux ecosystem overall. GH is for-profit…
EDIT: All right, all right, I’ve gotten schooled. Thank you, O wise ones; I didn’t realize how much Microsoft literally depends on Linux, among other things. I will proceed to shut up.
The case of free CI/CD, visibility, and network effects are already said. So I wanna offer an anectode: someone I know is a graphic designer, who maintains a project that curate icons. Moving to Codeberg means he has to interact with PRs using the CLI, which he really does not have familiarity with. GitHub OTOH has a simple desktop client that allows natively switching across PRs, approving then in the UI, etc. It’s really, really convenient for someone who’s not a developer.
I think Forgejo-based platforms will need to work on a very good GUI client, in order to attract less technical contributors.
Why doesn’t the web client fit their needs?
The idea is to download the “project” down to a local machine, switch to the contributors’ PRs, and have those new files natively show up in their directories. Then they can use local software i.e. Inkscape/Illustrator/etc to edit those SVGs and commit the appropriate changes. This is really not feasible with a forge’s web UI.
deleted by creator
Why aren’t all the reddit users over here yet? Consolidation and ease of use. Big number make brain happy.
Lazyness? Its why Amazon is such a success. Too difficult to do online search. Amazon is convinient.
It’s generally not the search, it’s the payment and shipping
It’s not the shipping; it’s the return policy. Amazon’s is almost impossible to beat apart from certain in-person stores like Costco or perhaps ALDI.
Yeah - now, the downsides of this are well covered, especially by Corey Doctrow, in that once the users are locked into the platform, Amazon decreases the actual benefits - and then starts chisling the sellers as well.
But to fix that, you do need to do something besides just scold the customers.
Doubt it, most other online stores with the same coverage do offer similar conditions.
The difference is the wide range of products available on Amazon. I can buy 5 products from widely different areas and only pay shipping once (or maybe twice depending on availability).
If I were to order these 5 products on 5 different stores I’d pay 5 times shipping.
And most Amazon customers have prime, meaning they’ve prepaid shipping already.
Your local or regional provider can and will send you books in the same time - perhaps not in 24h, but this may be rarely the case that somebody is in a such dearly need of a book.
I am buying books from my local provider, though more expensive, but I want people to have jobs - considering how many bookstores closed due to Amazon - and the possibility to go there, have a book in my hand and read it a bit.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Amazon talked about as a book store.
It’s not just books. Amazon offers many more goods, and locks people in with Prime.
I don’t like it, but just claiming it as a sign of virtue won’t change that.
True. And although some studies reported a positive effect on companies, I have my doubts based on what I have seen with my eyes in my city. A study issues further concerns:
https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/the-local-harms-of-amazon/
You are mistaken, they all are, what’s left is bots talking between them
Ha, if only that were the truth. I keep preaching over there and telling people to check out /r/RedditAlternatives, at least, so I like to think that I’ve moved at least one person over, which makes it all worthwhile.
For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.
I use both (why not?, they’re both free and it’s trivial to add a remote) - I find github is a little quicker to respond, a little easier to work with, and much more well known when you ask someone to go there they’re not queasy about what they might be connecting to…
I must’ve missed this meme if this is some sort of repeat.
no, thats just what a friend of mine said genuinely. unfortunately, gh (or rather it’s features) is necessary in some cases. such as free ci, bandwidth and storage.
It’s disappointing yet unsurprising to read the recurring answers, namely :
- cost
- incumbency
precisely because it’s absolutely avoidable and a well known strategy. It’s so well known that it’s precisely why Micro$lop bought Github in the first place. People are there and the free tiers is enough to get the long tail.
Meanwhile since that strategy happened people who consider smart enough should know the genuine cost behind this : it’s a TRAP. Plain and simple, you get there and you get STUCK there.
So… yes it takes some sweat and even some money to leave the trap … but if you care about freedom, as most free software or open-source developers might, then it’s aligned with your value.
Momentum and time and effort to migrate.
And there’s automated workflows such as GitHub Actions and ci/cd integrations that don’t have 1-to-1 replacements, which would mean extra work (for quite strained teams of volunteers)
Additionally, as a developer on a large open source project, the community is already established on GitHub. It would be incredibly risky to move it and hope everyone comes along.
Gentoo moved: https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/02/16/codeberg.html
Good for them, still, it’s risky, they just decided it was worth the risk
I moved my projects and yes I had to make new runners and pipelines for forgejo but it’s pretty much feature parity
Good for you, guess your setup is less complicated then.
There’s still plenty of stuff that is not a 1-to-1 drop in replacement, e.g. plenty use build previews from netlify, they have no drop-in for other providers so to get those you have to directly interact with the API instead, in a runner
Free CI/CD
Amuy new projects are codeberg. But github has a default 10gb repo space. Imagine everyone suddenly wants that on codeberg, the cost alone would force them to shut down or have other forms of income than donations.
I didn’t know the repo space was that different. That does play a factor in all this…
Did you download the source code? It’s on GitHub. It’s literally on GitLab. It’s on Bitbucket with ads. It’s literally on SourceForge. You can probably find it on Savannah. Dude it’s on Azure DevOps. It’s a Codeberg project. It’s on Gitea. You can download it on Gitea. You can go to Gitea and download it. Log into Gitea right now. Go to Gitea. Dive into Gitea. You can Gitea it. It’s on Gitea. Gitea has it for you. Gitea has it for you.
That’s kind of the point of git
Is that pron. “gih-tee” or “gih-tee-uh?”
Codeberg doesn’t offer CI runners* for macOS for free.
It’s important if you have cross platform apps
Runners? If MS is providing free dinners I might have to rethink my thoughts on github.
deleted by creator
I didn’t know GH did that… Cool!
A friend of mine sees using GitHub as microslop paying reparations to open source.
Right, like how Micro$lop :
- blocked repository search without login (while it worked before the acquisition)
- pushed in the most traditional Micro$lop fashion for its own product, e.g. Copilot, with in product ads
- use repositories as ways to feed its own set of products, e.g. Azure for OpenAI, in order to push for code generation while ignoring licenses
and all the other things (please feel free to make this list more comprehensive) as “reparations”?
It’s the same old "Embrace, extend, and extinguish " (EEE) scheme they’ve been (sadly successfully) running for decades now.
Also, what if MS or the government starts getting hostile and taking down Linux and other FOSS repos they don’t like?
Remember that Git is a distributed VCS, so no git repo is dependent on a central server. Everything else about the project might be heavily dependent on GH, but any active developer is going to have a full copy of the code with history on their main workstation.
That being said, it highly depends on the project, but I’d put it into a few buckets.
- Un/barely maintained projects - This is by far the largest number of repos, and many of them are used as dependencies by all sorts of projects. The truly unmaintained ones would vanish, and I bet most of the barely maintained ones would as well. The most important of these would probably be resurrected since their code will be sitting on all sorts of drives, but it will be a mess. Take a look at https://nesbitt.io/2026/05/08/weekend-at-bernies.html for an idea.
- Small individually actively maintained projects - There are a lot of these and many of them could continue to be just fine, depending on how much of the full GH feature set they use. They would lose all the PRs, wiki spaces, discussions, issues, and maybe even the project page itself that are hosted on GH. For most projects it would be an annoyance to have lost all that, but if it’s a small enough project that one person is maintaining it, it’s probably small enough to pull over to something else reasonably easily depending on how all in they are on GH tools and their use of type 1repos. And a project with only one main contributor is unlikely to fragment.
- Mid-sized active projects - Probably the hardest hit. A lot of these are all-in on the GH tools, particularly issues and CI. Losing that would hurt a lot because the project is big enough to really need those tools and uses them at a volume that they can’t just host on the leads laptop. These are also going to take a lot of work to set up the project infrastructure elsewhere. And this would probably be the sort of thing to push and simmering tensions to erupt, leading to fragmentation.
- The big projects - Probably the least hardest hit. Most of these are just using GH as a push mirror. The core team probably has a functioning private communication and governance system, their own issue tracker (even if it pulls from GH), documentation, and public discussion groups. Most of these run their own private CI. And they are the ones most likely for another host to step in and offer to help.
So the little stuff? Probably going to be annoyed or not care a lot. The big stuff? Same thing. But that middle group would be hurt.
Good analysis… I hadn’t considered that…
Then projects move their repos somewhere else which is pretty easy with git.
I joined Github and others, years ago to report bugs in software. But now I rage quit Github. No more bugs from me unless you move your application to a more acceptable platform. I suggest every bug reporter user do likewise. Screw Microsoft.
Hmm, good point… I am an avid bug reporter…
They all want to make America great again.
Did you literally just post this to say Microsoft GitHub
