"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
> Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
I’ve seen titles like “Why top scientists are leaving the United States” where the article itself talked about A SINGLE RESEARCHER relocating to France.
Currently I self-host Gitea [0], use its registry for Docker, NPM etc and act runners [1] for github actions alternative, everything secured under tailnet.
I'm extremely satisfied with that setup. It is batteries included & fire and forget.
Now I use Github only as backup by mirroring my self hosted repos.
I similarly have been using Gitea for some years. I use it as my main forge and mirror to Github for discoverability and community reports and contributions.
For public projects I have workflows that can publish and push containers to both Gitea and Github.
Similar with forgejo.
I mirrored all gh then flipped the ones I was using the most.
The biggest win was on running apple runners in my mac, so the free gh actions can do other stuff.
Github is an extra layer of backup, among normal backups.
[edit]
Notable reasons:
- Github runners went oftenly out of space & they were slow. With self hosted runners I don't have these issues anymore because I control the hardware.
Previously I was paying Docker Build Cloud/Depot for performance + Github Pro for extra minutes. Now it's zero cost, superb performance and unlimited minutes.
- I have a centralized registry with private packages and images.
- It's secure, I don't worry if I accidentally make a repo public or leak secrets. I control the access to it in network level.
- I own everything, in case something goes nuts (eg lose access to GH) I'm safe.
Not GP. Probably less dependencies on github, e.g. actions which sometimes don't work. This way github is a "dumb backup".
I selfhost forgejo (gitea fork) on home sever (nuc), similar setup with tailscale. I was planning to setup git mirror on a remote VM for backup, but since I am the only one using it and have everything on dev laptop and remote backups of nuc server I didn't bother to do that (I know I still should).
The self hosting will still be there and working as expected no matter what GH does (fails... again, DMCAs the repo, bans the account, etc.). Self hosting isn't only about being the only one with the data, it's also for the independence aspect. GH as a backup doesn't hinder the independence. Network effects are strong and make a lot of developers still have a GH presence as a secondary platform.
The evolution is when one can finally fully disconnect from GH, the main self hosted platform will continue to operate as if nothing happened.
A migration can have a period of parallel running.
As a developer who ditched Github and decided to self-host, there is only one reason. It's not technical difficulties, politics, nor AI. It's Microsoft. Like Apple, Facebook etc, I have a deep loathing for Microsoft and I want to remove as much of it from my life as I am able.
I now run Git on a pi using Gitea and Forgejo. I can now upload files of a size unheard of in GitHub, Claude can make a PR by itself that I can diff, edit, then merge, and even with the mighty power of a single pi 3b+, it feels more responsive.
Our CI for our entire org at https://github.com/lightningdevkit was turned off for 3 weeks because an outside contributor who was wrongfully banned made a PR. After multiple appeals we received no explanation and was told it was a permanent ban until we made a stir on twitter. They sadly are no longer a good place to work.
The appeal of GitHub for me is not only in the git hosting, but also in codespaces. It gives me:
1: An easy way to start a VM
2: A one-click solution to access it via private https access
So for development, I dont need to dabble with spawning my own Hetzner VM or something. And I also do not have to dabble with getting a temporary domain and DNS so I can set up my own letsencrypt certs and point the domain to that VM.
I can just write an index.html, execute "sudo python -m http.server 80", click the link that then opens to something.app.github.dev and test my new web application.
This is why codespaces make starting a new product idea a thing of like 1 minute instead of 1 hour for me.
I'm trying sourcehut at the moment https://sourcehut.org/ and it seems really good - very simple and fast. And does seem to be free for hosting open source projects.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to self-host GitLab with Docker Compose, GitLab has an official "Omnibus" Docker image. No need to handicap yourself with Gitea/Forgejo/whatever, you can just use an industry-standard platform without much effort.
Hardware requirements are nowhere close to high either.
For private code, it just feels safer to self host that -- ideally behind wireguard for an extra layer of security.
For public code hosting, GitHub have banned too many people/projects for comfort. From security researchers to 18+ game devs, too many have been wrongfully banned.
We've been self-hosting GitLab for about a year now, and I don't remember it ever going down or being unavailable. We self-host almost everything else too (except for online meetings), and it's all been pretty stable as well. Some of the tools we self-host do go down occasionally, but it's usually just a matter of restarting the VM or adding more storage.
Genuinely curious here for someone who has tried self hosting git and has found it a pita to maintain...i want to know what is it that devs are flocking to other platforms and how are we sure that they won't pull all the red card signals that github is said to pull off.
Have been self-hosting GitLab for my org a few years by now, with quite a few users (>800 atm). Updates are automatic via the GitLab Omnibus package repos. Once or twice per year some update requires intervention. Otherwise, nothing bad happens. Very happy so far.
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.
If you are running an org you should be putting all your private services behind netbird or tailscale at minimum. Zero public infra exposure beyond them.
Forgejo is fairly simple to run – way lighter and simpler than GitLab even. (GitLab is quite okay, too!)
If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.
It reminds me of the time where I deployed Gitea for self-hosting my git projects. In the end, nobody wanted to use it beyond myself. I would love to have a true federation protocol for Git, to decentralize the solution further.
I like GitHub and I'm not going to ditch anything, but I have to admit it's currently one of the few MS products that still holds up. Curious what it'll look like in a few years. Just in case, I've already reserved my username on Codeberg :)
Not good but that’s unsurprising since Thread’s value proposition is indistinguishable from twitter’s. Mastadon and bluesky seem to have healthy userbases though
Now if only the leader of Github would make Nazi salutes in public, regularly piss his pants due to frequent ketamine abuse, and cancel foreign aid causing 14 million brown children and other undesirable riff-raff to die by 2030, then maybe people would be as compelled to cancel Github as Twitter.
Why don't open source alternatives just copy the UI to make it easier to switch? Everyone knows the GitHub UI and it's intuitive. I'm happy to get more privacy and freedom, you don't have to make a worse design just to be different.
Fluxer figured this out and they're the best discord replacement imo.
I think they have the same interface. Pull requests are renamed to merge requests, that's all the difference I see. Wait for github to reshuffle the ui in a redesign churn.
Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.
I’m not disputing how intuitive the GitHub interface is, but seriously, why is it so hard for technical professionals to set aside 10–20 minutes of their time to learn a new interface? Why has this even become an issue worth discussing?
Do they? Or is it that a new account is opened every second? Because I’ve been seeing so many spammers and scammers that those numbers have to be skewed.
But Github is already fully volatile, capricious, fickle, erratic, unpredictable, variable, inconsistent, changeable, unstable, whimsical, protean, fluid, and a polluting poisonous room temperature liquid heavy metal, so why would you also need mercurial?
Yes, but the thing is just that if people are looking around for new providers it's an opportunity for alternative systems to attract attention and users.
I think and hope we see a lot more of this before the adversarial imperative returns from the company side.
People using Claude Fable to just make replacements for disgustingly enshittified software. We desperately need browser extensions to help make websites less scummy across the board as well.
I've ditched Github for all personal stuff. I just keep my repositories offline. I have a reliable backup process so what's the point in pushing it there? I don't give a shit about public profile, stars or any of that gamified crap and I certainly don't trust them.
Did we all forget that GitHub’s military-industrial complex owners over at Microsoft made sure to send the “business as usual” signal to the USG when they refused to stop helping ICE violate human rights en masse?
This was during the kidnap-and-rape-kids-in-cages days and before they started a general policy of kidnapping and/or summarily executing law-abiding citizens in the street. There are more reasons now to disassociate with collaborators with the US federal government than ever. I guess I could say I dropped GitHub before it was cool?
Microsoft is a morally bankrupt and despicable organization, just like Meta, Amazon, and modern Google and Apple. Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.
[Slow clap... building to thunderous applause. Standing ovation.]
I say! Well done! Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!
Now do a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how predatory, unethical libertarian crypto-scamming shills such as yourself and Trump are crashing the economy while violently tearing society apart into a tiny oligarchy and widespread poverty. Extra points for plugging your latest sociopathic crypto scam as the final solution.
"Why X are doing Y" articles like these pretend that the premise of "X are doing Y" is true, conveniently skipping to the "Why" before proving that the premise is even accurate in any meaningful way.
This is why I never buy headlines that start out with "Why".
> developers are ditching
Proceeds to list but a handful of remotely meaningful repos against the hundreds of thousands on there
The trend is what's interesting here. Github has never been threatened by anyone, because their service was too good to bother for everyone but the most ideologically motivated.
Now their service has become so bad there's a github joke at work every time something is down or slower than it should.
Reputation is a very valuable thing, and Github has destroyed a stellar one in a few month, this is newsworthy.
> Why some Americans are switching to soy
Would be more accurate than
> Why Americans are switching to soy
But wouldn't garner nearly the same amount of clicks.
There is conscious exaggeration in omitting 'some' - a fluff-blog click-farm trope I don't enjoy seeing in the developer space.
If there's a trend to leave a platform it won't start with the most entrenched users (largest repos).
They acknowledge your concern in the article and their analysis does apply to those few who are leaving. But to be fair the title can be interpreted either way and the most reasonable read for anyone is "some of them are leaving". I'd find it clickbaity if they said "why developers are leaving en-masse" and then point out to the regular turnover. There's clearly a trend, what's not clear is if it gains momentum.
That's the point being made. Is there a trend? How do we know?
There's always some repos moving between hosting providers for all kinds of reasons. The burden of proof is on the author here to show there's been an increase and they don't do that.
Currently I self-host Gitea [0], use its registry for Docker, NPM etc and act runners [1] for github actions alternative, everything secured under tailnet.
I'm extremely satisfied with that setup. It is batteries included & fire and forget.
Now I use Github only as backup by mirroring my self hosted repos.
[0] https://gitea.com
[1] https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/act-runner
That'll do it for GH, for whatever reason you "ditched" it.
For public projects I have workflows that can publish and push containers to both Gitea and Github.
For the personal-opensource ones, I am on Github because this is where everyone is when I want to share/collaborate etc
[edit]
Notable reasons:
- Github runners went oftenly out of space & they were slow. With self hosted runners I don't have these issues anymore because I control the hardware.
Previously I was paying Docker Build Cloud/Depot for performance + Github Pro for extra minutes. Now it's zero cost, superb performance and unlimited minutes.
- I have a centralized registry with private packages and images.
- It's secure, I don't worry if I accidentally make a repo public or leak secrets. I control the access to it in network level.
- I own everything, in case something goes nuts (eg lose access to GH) I'm safe.
I selfhost forgejo (gitea fork) on home sever (nuc), similar setup with tailscale. I was planning to setup git mirror on a remote VM for backup, but since I am the only one using it and have everything on dev laptop and remote backups of nuc server I didn't bother to do that (I know I still should).
The evolution is when one can finally fully disconnect from GH, the main self hosted platform will continue to operate as if nothing happened.
A migration can have a period of parallel running.
I now run Git on a pi using Gitea and Forgejo. I can now upload files of a size unheard of in GitHub, Claude can make a PR by itself that I can diff, edit, then merge, and even with the mighty power of a single pi 3b+, it feels more responsive.
I can just write an index.html, execute "sudo python -m http.server 80", click the link that then opens to something.app.github.dev and test my new web application.
This is why codespaces make starting a new product idea a thing of like 1 minute instead of 1 hour for me.
Anyone else used it and have thoughts on it?
Hardware requirements are nowhere close to high either.
For public code hosting, GitHub have banned too many people/projects for comfort. From security researchers to 18+ game devs, too many have been wrongfully banned.
+ not honouring yearly commitments plans
Biggest problem at the moment is that AI scrapers (curse them and their owners, pox be upon their houses!) sometimes bring things to a crawl. But nothing that a few firewall rules and anoubis won't solve.
If you want a hosted service, go for Codeberg. It’s run by a German non-profit (so it’ll be hard to bite and switch OpenAI-style). Only free/open source projects are accepted, though.
Loved Bitbucket's Mercurial offering. Looking for a replacement.
Heptapod is a GitLab fork that adds Mercurial support: https://heptapod.net/, free for open source projects: https://foss.heptapod.net/heptapod/foss.heptapod.net
https://hg.sr.ht/ that I learned of from a comment by frabcus on this post.
Thanks for links.
The dashboard clearly says 89.15% uptime!
Who says nines need to be leading?
Fluxer figured this out and they're the best discord replacement imo.
https://fluxer.app/
Until you have to work with stale GHAS tool configurations, remember whether a project uses rulesets or branch settings or find that comment you wrote on a PR (and then learn that the new PR "experience" fucking hides them above a certain threshold). Those are just the issues I encounter in a typical week.
Good luck. The amount of features and screens on GitHub are vast aside from just those code / issues / PRs tabs.
Do they? Or is it that a new account is opened every second? Because I’ve been seeing so many spammers and scammers that those numbers have to be skewed.
Was very happy to find that Hginit.com has been given a new life here
https://hginit.github.io/
People using Claude Fable to just make replacements for disgustingly enshittified software. We desperately need browser extensions to help make websites less scummy across the board as well.
This was during the kidnap-and-rape-kids-in-cages days and before they started a general policy of kidnapping and/or summarily executing law-abiding citizens in the street. There are more reasons now to disassociate with collaborators with the US federal government than ever. I guess I could say I dropped GitHub before it was cool?
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-and-us...
https://github.com/sneak
Microsoft is a morally bankrupt and despicable organization, just like Meta, Amazon, and modern Google and Apple. Anyone still doing ongoing business with them in 2026 is, imho, a fool.
So that would be almost everyone.
I say! Well done! Bravo! Bravo! Encore! Encore!
Now do a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe about how predatory, unethical libertarian crypto-scamming shills such as yourself and Trump are crashing the economy while violently tearing society apart into a tiny oligarchy and widespread poverty. Extra points for plugging your latest sociopathic crypto scam as the final solution.