Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

Motivations for Leaving GitHub

• Multiple commenters are moving away due to:
  • Frequent/annoying outages, possibly linked to AI load.
  • Discomfort with AI-driven product direction and “enshittification”.
  • Concerns over US jurisdiction, sanctions, and long‑term trust in large US tech firms.
  • Desire to reduce centralization and corporate dependence, especially for open‑source infrastructure.

Forgejo and Self‑Hosting Experiences

• Many report Forgejo as easy to self‑host and low‑maintenance, even on small hardware (Pi, NUC, homelabs).
• Liked aspects:
  • Lightweight, hackable codebase; easy to customize.
  • Community governance and recent move to GPLv3+ to resist commercial capture.
  • Used by public hosts like Codeberg and some EU / Dutch government deployments.
• Pain points:
  • Some bugs with mirroring from GitHub and package visibility.
  • Wiki and some features seen as weaker than GitHub’s.

Decentralization, Federation, and Identity

• Strong interest in making not just git but the forge layer decentralized:
  • Forgejo federation roadmap; comparisons to Radicle, Vervis, ForgeFed.
  • Idea of shared or dynamic OAuth identity providers so contributors can use their own domains/forges.
  • Signed commits and own domains suggested for decentralized identity.
• Some argue decentralization is often a proxy for wanting portability and exit options, not pure ideology.

GitHub’s Social Layer and Network Effects

• Many emphasize GitHub’s value is not just git hosting:
  • Discovery feed, stars, following others’ activity.
  • Issue tracking, PR reviews, project management, and centralized identity (“I know this account is that person”).
• Some say they barely use “social” features and would follow projects anywhere; others note employers expect GitHub profiles and vanity metrics matter for careers.
• Concern that leaving GitHub hurts discoverability and fragments the ecosystem.

CI/CD and Tooling Lock‑In

• GitHub Actions is seen as the hardest thing to replace:
  • Free runner capacity (especially for public repos) and multi‑OS matrices are hard to match elsewhere.
  • Moving repos is easy; migrating issues, CI, releases, and workflows is costly.
• Forgejo Actions (via act runner) is viewed as decent and largely compatible with GitHub Actions YAML, but with some rough edges.
• Broader worry that extra features (CI, packages, AI, etc.) are how hosts create lock‑in on top of portable git.

AI Training, Licensing, and Privacy Concerns

• Heated debate over GitHub/Copilot and other models training on public repos:
  • Some see this as license‑violating and “license‑washing” copyleft code.
  • Others argue current US legal signals favor fair use of training on publicly accessible code.
  • Several note moving off GitHub doesn’t inherently stop scraping, but may make it less automatic.
• Some refuse to host code publicly at all (or gate it) to avoid feeding commercial AI, even if that reduces openness.

Alternatives and Hybrid Strategies

• Mentioned or used alternatives: Forgejo (self‑hosted or Codeberg), Gitea, GitLab, SourceHut, Radicle, Tangled, bare git+SSH, gitweb/stagit, syncthing‑based workflows.
• Common strategies:
  • Self‑host Forgejo as “source of truth” with a read‑only GitHub mirror for discovery.
  • Internal/private Forgejo for companies, sometimes with public mirrors or separate public instances.
  • Use managed offerings (Pikapods, various EU‑hosted Forgejo/GitLab/SourceHut services) to avoid running servers.

Skepticism and Counterpoints

• Some argue “everyone is leaving GitHub” is exaggerated; overall GitHub usage is still growing.
• Others see parts of the movement as trend‑driven posturing or “virtue signaling”.
• A recurring theme: people want the benefits of decentralization and control, but many are unwilling to pay the ongoing operational cost, so centralization keeps reappearing in new forms.