Sentiment for/against GitHub aside...

"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

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.

It's been 9 months since I ditched Github.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

+ predatory pricing hikes for AI

+ not honouring yearly commitments plans

Mostly because developers (me included) don't like to be told we are being laid off due to AI that was trained on our free open-source hobby projects.

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.

https://fluxer.app/

No affiliation, but http://code.storage gets my vote.

Anyone has suggestions for hosting open source hobby projects managed with Mercurial.

Loved Bitbucket's Mercurial offering. Looking for a replacement.

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.

We ditched GitHub for self-hosted Forgejo and could not be happier. The experience is smoother, faster and distraction-free.

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.

I guess three nines availability is important.

It's pretty much broken by AI. Not only your private repos are not private, but also the LLM will leak them.

Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?

Im just glad the wider world has finally snapped out of their GitHub mono culture trance.

Extreme generalization, most devs aren't ditching GitHub yet.

People are going to copy GitHub the way people copied Facebook… how is "Threads" doing again?

> One new user joins every second

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.

So sad to see that no articles about this even mention Mercurial. This is a golden opportunity for Hg providers to shine.

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.

self-hosted gitea/forgejo is still better

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?

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.

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.