Why I'm Breaking Up with GitHub

Look, I’ve been using GitHub since forever – literally can’t remember a time when it wasn’t my go-to for code hosting. And honestly, it’s been pretty great for most of that time. But lately? I’ve been getting this nagging feeling that we’re growing apart.

I keep seeing GitHub push more and more toward enterprise features and commercial tools, especially with Copilot and those fancy code spaces. Hey, I get it – they need to make money. But there’s been this subtle shift away from what made GitHub the heart of open source, and it’s left me wondering if this relationship is still working for me.

Why I’m Moving On

Two things finally pushed me over the edge.

First, the platform’s culture has gotten kind of toxic. You know what I’m talking about – people making pointless commits just to turn their contribution graph green. I’ve seen folks submitting PRs to fix a single typo or reformat a README just so they can pad their GitHub profile when job hunting. It’s annoying for project maintainers who are already stretched thin, and it’s created this weird defensive culture where maintainers have to gate-keep their repos from drive-by “fixes” that don’t really help anyone.

The second thing is Copilot. Not the tool itself – it’s actually pretty cool tech. But the way they’ve trained it feels… sketchy. They scraped public repos without really considering the licenses or providing proper attribution to the original developers. This has gotten so bad that people are now talking about creating special licenses just to prevent AI systems from training on their code. There are even some legal challenges¹ brewing. Between the contribution-farming culture and these ethical questions around Copilot’s training data, I just can’t justify sticking around anymore.

Checking Out GitLab

A bunch of folks have jumped ship to Gitlab.com as their next home. It’s run by the GitLab company, which also offers their Community Edition as an open-source option you can self-host. Some pretty big projects like Debian and Gnome use it, which is a solid endorsement.

I actually gave GitLab a fair shot - spent a good six months there. But I just couldn’t get comfortable with it. The UI feels clunky to me, like everything takes two extra clicks compared to what I’m used to. And something about being backed by venture capital makes me nervous about their long-term plans. Will they eventually go the same route as GitHub once investors start demanding bigger returns?

There was also that weird incident where their execs reportedly told female employees to wear high heels². Not directly related to the product, but it definitely raised my eyebrows about company culture.

Codeberg

After looking around, I ended up landing on Codeberg. It’s basically a free home for open-source stuff, which feels right to me - open-source code should live on an open-source platform. It runs on Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea, so if you’ve used GitHub, the interface feels pretty familiar.

What really sold me was that it’s run by Codeberg e.V., an actual nonprofit based in Berlin. Their website lays out their whole mission, and their blog archives show how they’ve grown and tackled problems along the way. Plus, they offer free hosting as long as your project has the right kind of license³, which is pretty generous.

Further Investigation

One thing I noticed about Codeberg is that they don’t offer actions or runners by default - you need to provide your own hardware for runners if you want to use actions. I can see how this would be useful in future projects, but I need to dig into it more.

I also discovered their CI is powered by Woodpecker, and you need to request access to it (probably to keep their resources from getting hammered). Turns out you can host your own Woodpecker instance and hook it up to your Codeberg account, which gives me more control anyway. I’m looking into this as an option.

Next Steps

So what am I actually doing about all this? Well, I’ve already moved a bunch of my personal projects over to Codeberg. The transition was pretty painless - create new repo, push existing code, update any docs with new URLs, done. This site is now hosted there too, which feels like a nice step forward.

For now, I’m keeping my GitHub account around. Let’s be real - it’s practically required for contributing to most major open source projects these days. But for my own stuff? I’m happier having it elsewhere. And who knows, maybe as more people make the switch, we’ll start seeing some real alternatives emerge.

I’m not trying to be all preachy here - GitHub still makes sense for tons of projects and teams. But for me personally, the combination of shifting priorities and questionable ethics was enough to make me look for greener pastures. Sometimes a fresh start is exactly what you need.