Rant: I wish more people stopped using Github

Codeberg is criminally underrated. The UI is great, it's 100% open source, it has CI, and it will have federation in the future. It's a shame more people don't use it. Piefed/river and a bunch of cool niche projects are on it though :D

The lemmy developers should seriously think of moving lemmy to codeberg, it'd be in line with lemmy's anti-corporate stance.

I support moving off GH but

There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there

Currently this is the case everywhere? With the exception of projects that take email patches, currently all the options are centralised/not federated, and even if e.g. Forgejo finished adding ActivityPub integration you'd still need an account on some Forgejo instance to contribute. Same for email patches; they still require having an email address. If it's specifically about giving MS your data, sure, although iirc the only data they actually require is an email address. You can use duckduckgo's duck addresses to get one that's relatively anonymous (i.e. can be deanonymised by duckduckgo but I doubt anyone's conspiring that hard to deanonymise a random github user).

While I agree about most of your gripes. I don't think requiring an account to contribute is unreasonable. I can underdtand not wanting to create an account and give them personal info and such. But if that is your stance, stop using them entirely. Giving them code is even worse.

Specifically for the rate limit issue, a lot of nix's derivations are hosted on GitHub and now and then the rate limit problem comes up when I rebuilds a dev environment.

Nixos.org is kind enough to host gigabytes of cache, but to get a ~40MiB tarball, we need to beg at the door of M$. Path dependency is really a trap.

I used codeberg and liked it. This is a good reminder to try to stick with it moving forward

I'm really looking forward to Forgejo federation

I see projects move over to Gitlab a lot lately, but without porting over the issues. That means a huge amount of history and discussions are lost. If you want to find out why something is the way it is, old issues would be a goldmine. Sometimes they are still up on archived GitHub, but not always.

Complaining about needing an account to contribute is wild to me.

without these unnecessary roadblocks

But then how will they harvest your data?

If I have to search something in a repo, I just clone it and use my IDE. GitHub search sucks, but I don't think it's possible to have a web experience that is on par with an actual environment an IDE.

Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features, but if all you're doing is hosting your code, please consider an alternative.

Don't worry, their CI is pure garbage.

I've stopped using github because I hate advertising and nags. Probably most people don't care much about it, but for me github nagging and 'reminding' me about copilot is just so off-putting that I immediately want to leave the site. I don't want my attention stolen like that.

I sound like a corporate shill but like, I don't know if this is due to abuse.

GitHub actions and certain things were free until the crypto bros started abusing it. There are certain challenges that happen at scale.

Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features

Github actions are terrible - fight me.

commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: actions
commit: Another actions fix
commit: Fixing actions
commit: Fixed issue with actions
commit: Actions not logging in properly
commit: typo in actions
commit: Created GH actions!

whats funny is I was working in an azure shop and we got rate limited on api calls that caused all sorts of issues and for modern times it really was not a lot of calls. Much less internal calls from a customer on one of the big three cloud computing providers. Seriously!!! Oh and their support was like. Yeah it will do that.

Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.

Want to mention that OneDev does support SSH clone. Only that SSH access to code.onedev.io is turned off (code.onedev.io is not a public hosting service, it is set up to develop OneDev itself).

It was easy enough to introduce Git with a self hosted Gitea at my work place 4 years ago. I see Codeberg is based on a fork of Gitea called Forgejo, so I guess it is also good.

Account requirements seem like a worthwhile safeguard against spam.

Projects can still use and accept emails or whatever outside of GitHub.

I also want to note that in the year 2025, GitHub still does not support IPv6. Folks behind CGNAT in IPv4-starved geos suffer, as does everyone developing for all-IPv6 networks. And it's not like they can't do it, seeing as their various subdomains like pages.github.com have working IPv6 already.

It'd be cool to use one service to upload to everything simultaneously.

That's M$ doing their EEE-dance as usual. Actions is pretty egregious, my company's decided that All must be in the cloud™, even CI/CD, so Actions it is... Soon enough, bit by bit, a lot will depend on GitHub's functionality and there you have it, full circle, it'll be a pain to move elsewhere. Or do you still think all GitHub is is a git front-end?

I selfhost using forgejo (the same project codeberg is using) and I only clone on github.

This should be a good first step to decentralize.

For a small project I recently switched to fossil from git. It’s also distributed version control, but includes a bug tracker, wiki, and other stuff as well. It’s minimalist, but hosting yourself is super easy.

Default git over ssh is often enough as well. Combine with any bug tracker and CI you like. You don’t need to use an all in one tool like GitHub.

Look, I get it that it's trendy to hate on Microsoft, but these complaints don't even make sense. You complain about requiring an account to contribute, and then you propose some other services that do the exact same thing! Turning github into a 4chan style free-for-all is a terrible idea. Maybe that's exactly why you VPN got blocked, because it's enabling spam accounts. And what info are you giving Microsoft to create an account? An email, a password and a username? Not exactly doxxing material, is it? I just searched for some code from one of my repos in incognito and it was the first thing that popped up.

Microsoft is not preventing you from migrating, it's just that there is no standard for issues, discussions, PRs etc. But every other service has an import tool that can do it if needed. And if you're only hosting code (doubt) you're a git remote add & git push away from being free of that evil Microsoft that is hosting all your repos for free.

I hate Microsoft and big corporations just about as much as anyone on Lemmy, but geez, pick your battles people.

But people said it wasn't a big deal if microsoft bought it all up!!?

Enshittification is everywhere.

I hate that they started taking down emulation repos more and more. They have a majority and heavy visibility for companies.

Gitlab probably isn't much better these days but at least it's open sauce. Until I build a forgejo instance it's gitlab for me.

The thing is, having a "centralized" place makes it easier to cooperate with others, with a single account. Monopoly is probably not the right word here, because nobody is really dependent on Github. And the core functionality of hosting the code and builds for free does come at no cost (money) at all. All Git functionality work. It is still Git.

I don't see anything in Github that is against Open Source and Libre Software. The features like searching might not be optimal, but that's just a feature of the site. On the other hand, I'm also just a little guy who does scripting and small CLI tools. So it does not matter at all what I do. In the end, I do not feel the need to stop using Github, despite disliking Microsoft a lot.

rip gitorious

I would be pretty interested in reading a more robust analysis between the alternatives you list and GitHub itself. Going to each one and giving them a glance really doesn't show me much other than "yup, it's similar to GitHub".