GitHub outages reopen the self-hosting question on Lobsters

A Lobsters ask post on 2026-08-17 asked whether GitHub's repeated downtime justifies moving to an alternative, and drew 71 points and 76 comments. The trigger was concrete: commenters reported GitHub down for roughly 20-30 minutes that day with sporadic issues throughout, and one noted githubusercontent returning 429s on every request, which broke installing nvm because its install script is hosted there.

The thread's dominant answer is that the decision splits by use case rather than by principle. Several commenters said corporate users are locked in by Actions, user management, and free CI runners; one said their organization can't replace Actions because they know of no managed platform offering Linux, Linux-ARM, Windows, Windows-ARM, macOS-Intel, and macOS-ARM runners. Another commenter said their workplace is seriously considering a move, helped by an existing policy against third-party actions.

For personal and small projects, the suggested path was mostly not another forge but static hosting: bare git repos served over git's dumb HTTP protocol, plus stagit or generated static HTML for a web view, tarballs with checksums, and atom feeds. One commenter described also serving Go modules from static HTML with an nginx rule for ?go-get=1 requests. Others floated reviving shared "tilde" servers running git hosting, mailing lists, and hook-based CI for a project's members.

What the thread does not settle: whether any of this is happening at scale. The original question asked when the majority would switch, and nobody offered evidence either way. Codeberg came up as an option, with a claim it restricts itself to open source and one unanswered question about whether it accepts PolyForm-style non-commercial licenses.