Developers abandon GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting
Original: Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
Why This Matters
Signals a potential shift in open-source hosting norms away from Microsoft-owned GitHub toward decentralized alternatives.
A growing number of open-source projects—including Ghostty, Zig, and Tenacity—are leaving GitHub over concerns about downtime, Microsoft's ownership, and political direction. Despite GitHub hosting 600M+ repos and nearly 1B commits in 2025, some high-profile maintainers are migrating to Codeberg or self-hosted alternatives.
GitHub remains dominant by raw numbers: one new user joins every second, it hosts over 600 million repositories, and nearly one billion commits were made in 2025. Yet a visible minority of open-source projects is departing. Ghostty, a cross-platform terminal emulator maintained by Mitchell Hashimoto, announced in April 2026 it would incrementally remove GitHub dependencies while keeping a read-only mirror. Zig, a systems programming language seen as a C successor, announced its departure in November 2025 after a decade-long GitHub presence dating to 2015. Audio editor Tenacity announced its move via Reddit in 2023 and now only maintains a mirror on GitHub. Other projects including the Dillo browser and Hare programming language have also migrated. Many projects such as GNOME and Apache never used GitHub at all, preferring self-hosting. Cited reasons include frequent service downtime, and broader concerns about GitHub's direction under Microsoft ownership. The pattern may signal early stages of a wider migration toward platforms like Codeberg or independently operated Git servers.