Intro
Ever since Microsoft acquired Github in 2018, I’ve been thinking of migrating away from Github.
It isn’t that Microsoft isn’t necessarily more or less evil than Github, it is just the way things go sometimes where a parent company must use an acquired company for leverage.
But to where?
Where could I move my code to that also isn’t another company waiting to enshitify its service?
Then I ready about this still fake star nonsense and thought, yea, this is a silly place.
Alternatives Considered
I considered self-hosting. It is fun to do, but I would be giving up the network effects of having my code in a place that can be easily shared. Also I’ve come to realize that self-hosting things sucks in the long term.
I considered sourcehut, which has a nice indie vibe to it, created by a single developer. But that is a bus factor of 1.
That made me actually considered what my requirements are. What do I actually want in a code service? I realized it was a single answer: Longevity.
I want this to be the last place I have to move my code to.
My History of Code Hosting
I’ve used SourceForge, Launchpad, and Google Code (RIP) for public hosting.
End the end, regardless of their features or whether they bundle malware with their downloads, they all have one thing in common: they are backed by companies.
It may seem obvious. What else would they be backed by?
What if there was a code hosting organization specifically created to avoid the issue of depending on for-profit motives. What if that service was built specifically to guarantee longevity, independence, and reliability?
Codeberg fits the bill.
Codeberg.org
From the docs:
Codeberg is a democratic community-driven, non-profit software development platform operated by Codeberg e.V. and centered around Codeberg.org, a Gitea-based software forge. … The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
Dependencies on commercial, external, or proprietary services for the operation of the platform are avoided, in order to guarantee independence and reliability.
This is perfect. It is kinda like a developer coop hosting service.
This sounds like it could be my source code “forever home”, and it may be the last migration I have to make.
Maybe I’ll even join the e.V. and volunteer to help run their stuff?
Github’s Gravity
I will still keep a Github account for a long time. There is just too much gravity there, and some of my repos have actual contributors and I don’t want to force them to move.
But all my personal repos have been migrated. Indeed this blog post that you are reading (at the time of this writing) is hosted on Codeberg Pages.
Conclusion
I’m not moving to Codeberg because Github became popular. I don’t care about how popular a service is.
I’m not moving to Codeberg because they have better services. They have comparable services but can’t really compete with all of what Github provides.
I’m not moving to Codeberg just to try out something new. It is not bad to try something new, just not the reason this time.
I’m moving because I’m tired of moving. And because I’m tired of feeling like “the product”.
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