Leaving GitHub means leaving the community, not the Git

Codeberg's recent decision to prohibit projects consisting mostly of generative-AI-written code set off wide discussion, and a post by Lalit M uses the reaction as a starting point for a broader argument: the disappointment revealed that people wanted Codeberg to be a universal GitHub replacement, which it never claimed to be.

The author's core claim is that plenty of places will host a Git repository, but almost none host an open-source community. GitHub supplies a shared pool of identities, familiar issue and PR conventions, and — historically — discovery. Self-hosting a forge works for personal projects, but asking a stranger to create an account and learn your conventions to file a small bug is a real barrier. Federation via Forgejo is still explicitly experimental, with moderation and access control undeveloped. Radicle's web interface is read-only, so contributing means installing its CLI or desktop app. SourceHut's email workflow is unfamiliar to most GitHub users. Tangled, the author's favourite, is in alpha.

The practical hook for developers is reliability. GitHub itself described two recent major incidents as "not acceptable," and Mitchell Hashimoto announced in late April that Ghostty is leaving GitHub after outages blocked PR review — while noting the problem is the surrounding infrastructure, not Git. Hashimoto said Ghostty was talking to multiple commercial and FOSS providers and planned an incremental migration.

What's unresolved is whether a deliberately boring, for-profit forge could work as a business. The author has no answer to the cold-start problem: shared identity and discovery only become valuable at scale, and Bitbucket is the obvious counterexample of a conventional commercial forge that never grew a comparable community.