This will still be a slow process. I don't want to rush it; in fact it's something I've seen coming ever since Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018. But it's already high time I packed and left GitHub.
I've held off on pulling the trigger because, well, it's a tedious thing to do that will take time, but also because I don't want to hop on the wrong cart.
Microsoft has been wielding GitHub not for the sake of the open source community, but in service of their AI agenda, as a source of training data and as avenue to sell their Copilot-powered vibe-coding vision of software development. Must I be explicit, I reject the current trend of developing using LLMs due to the many, many concerns linked to the technology. You can get a glimpse of these problems in Open Slopware's “Why not LLMs?”.
Of course, as an added “bonus”, the single-minded focus on AI has meant that GitHub has increasingly lost reliability and responsiveness. It's almost rare that I don't have to refresh a GitHub tab to get it to load anymore.
I'm not going to remove my repositories from GitHub (not yet, at least,) since I don't like broken links, but they will probably stop getting updated in the future, at least those that I can. Sadly, the Elm package system directly depends on the GitHub infrastructure, which means that at the very least my Elm packages will continue to get pushed there.
So where to, then? After waiting and seeing, I've witnessed many projects and people I respect move to Codeberg. So I've followed that inertia—here's mine. A good example of this trend is the Zig project. The Zig developers wrote a great blog post when they migrated to Codeberg, in which they share their pragmatic and ideological reasons for the switch.
The most likely reason why Codeberg has become the de facto destination for conscious open source developers is that the service is a deployment of Forgejo, which is open source software that is also developed on its Codeberg repository. GitHub clearly contrasts with Codeberg's ethos: despite being the preferred home for open source, it's own software has remained closed source and owned by a private company. It was inevitable that it would get enshittified, by virtue of its Silicon Valley model of business. Forgejo is even copyleft, which is a nice check to prevent future shenanigans.
Another alternative I considered is Radicle. The cool thing is that it's a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer system. It seems to be very neat, and I do want to give it a good try. But right now it doesn't look like a pragmatic alternative to GitHub; it's not nearly as well-adopted as Codeberg, nor is it as mature.
By the way, the gif at the top was drawn using WigglyPaint. Check it out.
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