Codeberg, a Git code hosting platform, recently took a
decision to prohibit projects that mostly consist of generative-AI-written code
which has prompted
concern and
extensive discussion
elsewhere.
The decision does not surprise me, and I don’t mean that as a criticism.
Codeberg has always presented itself as a mission-driven alternative to GitHub,
not neutral infrastructure.1
What interests me is the disappointment in the response. Many people reacted as
though one of the few plausible GitHub replacements had ruled them or their
projects out. They wanted Codeberg to be a universal alternative, a better
GitHub and the obvious place to go when leaving it.
To me, that exposes a big gap in the open-source space. There are plenty of
places to host a Git repository, but remarkably few places to host an
open-source community. GitHub gives projects a shared pool of identities, habits
and paths to discovery. None of the alternatives has reproduced that at a
similar scale.
I don’t think the answer has to be another centralized platform, or that every
project should live in one place. But decentralization is not enough on its own.
Whatever replaces GitHub still needs a shared social layer: identities
contributors already have, conventions they understand and ways to discover
projects across the network.
Whenever dissatisfaction with GitHub comes up, someone inevitably says: “Git is
decentralized. Just self-host a forge.”
I’ve self-hosted Gitea for years, so this is an argument I’m very familiar with.
Self-hosting works well for personal projects, but I wouldn’t use it for
something I wanted strangers to contribute to. On GitHub, most people already
have an account and understand how issues and pull requests work. On my forge,
even reporting a small bug means creating another account, learning how my forge
works and what conventions I want you to follow. Unless someone really cared,
they probably wouldn’t bother. I know I wouldn’t.
And contribution is only half of it. GitHub used to be genuinely good at
discovery. I regularly found projects because someone I followed starred them,
often in areas I would never have searched for myself. It felt like a social
network built around people making things.
GitHub has since redesigned that feed, and I almost never visit it anymore.
Defaults are powerful: once discovery stopped being part of the experience
GitHub put in front of me, it largely disappeared from my workflow.
The basic experience of GitHub has been getting steadily worse. It is slow,
things regularly fail to load and notifications are unreliable. GitHub itself
recently described two major incidents as
“not acceptable”.
Its pull request experience has been awful too. Large PRs are painfully slow to
navigate and review. Stacked PRs2 have been common inside large
software companies for well over a decade, but only just
became a thing
with GitHub and, even then, seems to be
quite
buggy.
What frustrates me about GitHub’s push towards AI is that the core forge feels
neglected while Copilot appears everywhere. An agent writing more code doesn’t
help when the interface for reviewing it is already struggling.
Ghostty exemplifies this frustration. In late April, Mitchell Hashimoto
announced that
Ghostty is leaving GitHub
because frequent outages were preventing its maintainers from working reliably:
On the day I am writing this post, I’ve been unable to do any PR review for ~2
hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage. This is no longer a place for
serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.
Interestingly, he also makes the point that GitHub is more than hosting:
To the “Git is distributed!” crowd: the issue isn’t Git, it’s the
infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.
Hashimoto said Ghostty was in discussions with multiple commercial and FOSS
providers and planned an incremental migration. The fact that such a prominent
project had to shop around, rather than move to an obvious default, is exactly
the gap I mean.
It’s worth going through the alternatives and the problems I see with each:
GitLab is capable, but it feels incredibly
corporate, even more so than GitHub.3 Nor have I found it as
good as GitHub at helping people stumble across projects and developers.
SourceHut is focused and transparent and, like Codeberg,
openly values-driven.4 Its email-oriented workflow, while
battle-tested by projects like the Linux kernel, is unfamiliar to most GitHub
users.
Forgejo’s federation project may eventually connect
self-hosted instances into a shared network. It looks promising, but has been in
development for quite some time, remains experimental5 and
is not yet a practical answer to the social fragmentation of self-hosting.
Radicle is technologically interesting: repositories are
replicated peer to peer, while issues and patches are stored alongside them. But
it still feels too immature to replace GitHub for a public project. For example,
its public web interface lets people browse repositories, but contributing
requires them to install its CLI or desktop application. Someone encountering a
bug should not have to install the forge’s software merely to report
it.6
The project I’m most interested in is Tangled, based
mostly on gut feel. I like its focus on the social experience around code. For
example, its home page immediately shows me a bunch of cool projects, exactly
like old GitHub used to do. But it is still in alpha, and it remains to be seen
whether it can blossom into a true alternative.
One thing that stands out is that, apart from GitLab, every competitor is
built around either decentralization or a social mission. That makes each of
them fundamentally less “straightforward” than a for-profit company. It makes me
wonder whether there is room for one.
Perhaps it could look more like bunny.net than a
venture-backed startup: a deliberately boring company with no ambition to become
the operating system for software development or to reorganize programming
around whatever technology investors currently find exciting. It might simply
concentrate on making open-source collaboration pleasant and reliable, charge
developers and smaller organizations directly, and grow at whatever pace that
revenue supports.
The open question is whether this could be a viable business. The difficult part
is exactly what I keep saying is missing: shared identity, shared conventions
and discovery only become valuable once a platform has reached scale. Better
repository hosting alone would not solve that cold-start problem.7
I don’t know who, if anyone, will solve it. But a real replacement will have to
treat the social layer as the product, not as something that appears
automatically once enough repositories are hosted.
The
English translation of the bylaws
says Codeberg’s purpose “also intends to raise awareness for the social and
philosophical questions” connected to free content and free software. ↩︎
Stacked PRs split a large change into a sequence of dependent, individually
reviewable changes. ↩︎
For example, GitLab’s homepage describes it as
“your intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.” ↩︎
For example, its Terms of Service prohibit
cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. ↩︎
Forgejo says
federation is under active development and considered experimental.
Moderation and access control have not yet been developed, and breaking
changes are expected. ↩︎
Radicle’s
web interface is read-only, so
interaction requires the CLI or desktop application. Features such as
releases and bundled package registries are absent. CI is possible through
community projects,
but is neither official nor tightly integrated. ↩︎
Bitbucket is the obvious existing
counterexample: a conventional commercial forge that has never developed
into a shared open-source community comparable to GitHub. ↩︎
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