Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

What came through clearly is not "everyone is leaving GitHub" but "more people want a credible fallback." Self-hosting is the practical version of that. Several people said they now run Gitea, Forgejo, or GitLab as the primary system and mirror back to GitHub for discovery or backup. The appeal was concrete. They control runners, registries, secrets, access, and uptime. Some said their CI got dramatically faster once they stopped depending on GitHub Actions. Others said the bigger issue is governance risk. A wrongful ban, a DMCA takedown, or a policy decision can knock out your repo or CI with little recourse. The strongest GitHub-specific complaints were operational and trust-related. People cited repeated outages, rate limits on casual browsing, blocking of privacy tools like Apple Private Relay, and product decisions that remove visibility or make the interface harder to use. One maintainer described an outside contributor's ban disabling their org's CI for weeks until public pressure reversed it. That story made the abstract dependency risk feel very real. Codeberg got a more mixed read than the article suggested. Some maintainers said it works fine and contributors still find them there. Others said its anti-scraping defenses hurt normal users, sometimes replacing repos with bot-deterrent nonsense or adding interstitial friction to every page. The justification is easy to understand. Operators of public forges are getting slammed by aggressive LLM scrapers that hit blame views, archives, search filters, and old commits from huge pools of rotating IPs. But the takeaway was blunt. If your anti-bot setup breaks repo access, you've damaged the core product. Codeberg also drew concern for a separate reason: a live proposal to ban projects that mostly consist of AI-generated code. For some, that is a welcome quality filter. For others, it makes Codeberg feel ideologically governed rather than predictable infrastructure. So the comments landed in a pretty clear place. The article oversells the trend, but the motivations are real. GitHub still wins on network effects, discoverability, and extras like Codespaces. That is why many people keep a GitHub mirror even after moving the center of gravity elsewhere. The shift is not a rush to one new dominant host. It is a move toward optionality, self-hosting where possible, and reducing how much of the software supply chain depends on one increasingly fragile platform.