GitHub

What hackers pick instead

• ForgejoA lightweight, free self-hosted GitHub alternative that runs as a single binary with little maintenance and good Actions compatibility, though its CI is less complete and contributor federation is missing.380recommend
• GitLabPraised for its strong built-in CI/CD, finer access and group structure, and the option to self-host for full control, though many find it bloated, resource-hungry and cluttered.331recommend
• CodebergA non-profit, community-run code host for open source projects, valued as a Microsoft-free GitHub alternative that bans AI-generated code; critics fault its arbitrary-seeming rules and reliability.331recommend
• GiteaA lightweight, easy-to-run self-hosted GitHub alternative with mirroring and Actions-compatible CI; critics cite vague security fix disclosures, permission gaps and its commercial company ties.195recommend
• TangledA federated GitHub alternative built on AT Protocol, with portable identity and easy self-hosted git servers (knots); critics worry about VC funding and the lack of private repos.127recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 4499 comments. Each links to the original.

1. it's probably a mistake for any one company to not pick GitHub, because it's likely a higher friction distraction from what the actual goals are of the company

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “GitHub to Codeberg: my experience”

2. github is great for discovering and tracking projects, reflecting growth via the star and fork system (although a bit broken in the last few years)

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service”

3. Some of my attraction to github is just that I am used to and like the UI, and I get annoyed on another platform where I don't understand the UI

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

4. The base infrastructure is open source and replicable, and still there's a virtuous cycle that keeps people choosing it over the alternatives.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B”

5. github's business model is not really a git repository but a bunch of other (admittedly useful) stuff that traps people in their ecosystem

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability”

6. Frankly not very compelling reasons to ditch the most popular forge if you value other people using/contributing to your project at all.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: µJS, a 5KB alternative to Htmx and Turbo with zero dependencies”

7. Using the Github squash merge approach, every commit in the main branch refers back to a pull request, which makes this super nice.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Git Rebase for the Terrified”

8. I’m grateful for GitHub and their support for open source, but they’re not getting any sympathy for the AI mess they’re generating

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub's Historic Uptime”

9. General outage was uncommon, but unicorns and octocat popping up for particular pages/repos was common enough for me in the past.

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “GitHub Is Experiencing Difficulties”

10. GitHub's reliability could stand to be improved but without narrowing down to products these sort of comparisons are meaningless.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub's Historic Uptime”

11. But Github's tooling is based around the squash merge. It works well and I don't know anyone in real life who has issues with it.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code”

12. Although I'm not a fan of GH, I appreciate the ability to see how popular/valid some project is by looking at the number of stars

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Migrating Dillo from GitHub”

13. That's something github gives for free, and for me, it's the only reason to stay on github for small/tiny free software projects

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Incident with Github.com”

14. The scale problem will keep getting worse, and it's getting worse in a way I don't think is translating to more money for them.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”

15. they need to pick a lane and decide if they want to boost professional developer productivity or be a platform for vibe coding

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service”

16. they are clearly on board with the idea given that they help massive projects like Nix packages instead of kicking them off

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out”

17. Only downside I've found to this workflow is that it would make it harder to migrate to a different Git forge in the future

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “More on Version Control”

18. GitHub also serves as a community hub beyond being a code hosting and collaboration platform, where engineers can connect.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot App”

19. It's hard to get adoption without a community; it gives you valid bug reports, use cases you didn't think of, and patches.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports”

20. Github has an insane level of vendor lock-in that you cannot understand until you fully remove yourself from the platform.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

21. If I go to one of your GPL projects and I ask a simple question to find out what this project is about, you will be perfectly "ok" that this interaction will be used for training? This is not ok.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos”

22. GitHub has completely enshittified and has become so unreliable, that even self-hosting a Git repository or self-hosted actions yourself would have a far better uptime than GitHub.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability”

23. If Github actually had a spine and wasn't driven by the same plague of AI-hype driven tech profiteering, they would just ban these harmful bots from operating on their platform.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward”

24. GitHub, a decade later, with Microsoft's resources and thirty times the headcount, is putting out post-mortems that read like undergraduate distributed systems coursework.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'”

25. GitHub status page is a Christmas tree for 3 quarters and comically had an incident 10 minutes after the "we're working hard on fixing stability!" blog post published.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “What does GitHub's security team even do?”

26. it's failing silently, too, showing e.g. "There aren’t any open pull requests." even though there are dozens. That's pretty bad, this will definitely mislead people.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub is having issues now”

27. Github obviously isn't making explicit claims like this but they benefit whenever people with purchasing power implicitly understand that github is the only option.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Local Git Remotes”

28. Ongoing availability issues, Microsoft's shoehorning of AI, GitHub's focus on migrating to Azure infrastructure rather than adding features and fixing shortcomings.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “GitHub to Codeberg: my experience”

29. if GitHub continues functioning as a reliable hub for git workflows, and I have the strong suspicion nobody except for the shareholders gives a lick about copilot

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “GitHub is once again down”

30. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional?

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

31. First just because github is not Foss, then accelerated because of Microsoft, and Microsoft now mismanaging Github with ai bullshit accelerated it even more.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Gentoo on Codeberg”

32. Is it possible to create mirrors of every repo with no Microsoft dependency or until someone else acquires GitHub from Microsoft and makes it more reliable

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere?”

33. GitHub's API has extremely aggressive rate limits which make migrating large numbers of existing issues and PRs off of the platform borderline impossible.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg”

34. A lot of those bugs are fundamental ones related to the basic architecture unfortunately and can't be easily fixed because of all the load bearing crap

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “GitHub's new dashboard experience now the default”

35. It was very stable for many years, and I do believe the recent issues are mostly or all because they were caught flat-footed by the rapid AI-driven load increases.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Disruption with Some GitHub Services – Resolved”

36. GitHub survived on Ruby On Rails - which was notorious for being slow at scale back then - and still managed to have better uptime than all the execs at Microsoft

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Ghostty is leaving GitHub”

37. I've limited participation in my libraries with GitHub's setting that nobody who made an account in the last 6 months can do anything in my repos

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “The August 17 outage, and the work ahead”

38. It was so good that microsoft, a company previously known for its "developers, developers, developers" stance decided to spend a cool bill on it.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Incident with Actions, Pull Requests and Issues”

39. It would be catastrophic, but there is no reason Github couldn't disappear or otherwise change some policies that require moving away from it.

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Don't couple your Go code to GitHub”

40. It means the truth about code quality, potential caveats, and better forked revisions can disseminate freely even when the author disappears.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Why users cannot create Issues directly (Ghostty)”