Not naming names but heard from contacts that it is currently a sh*t-show of politics internally right now at GitHub and no progress is being made/large parts of the platform are abandoned unless P0.
I'm personally very tired of shoving AI everywhere otherwise GitHub is okay-ish albeit it seems it performed much better when it was a rails website rather than a react "app".
Honestly, I've been trying to cut down on the number of Microsoft development tools in my workflow because they are so drunk on the AI Kool-Aid that it's affecting the usability and reliability of their products in pretty much every other respect.
I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.
I suspect GitHub - and, to some extent, Microsoft at large - is going through something of a trust thermocline[1] event right now. There's been frustration brewing with GitHub as an open source platform for a while, but not enough for any one project to leave by itself; but over time enough has built up that various projects decided they had the last straw, and it's getting to be a bit viral via the HN front page.
I think it remains to be seen how large this moment actually is, but it's something I've been thinking about re: GitHub for a while now. Also, I suspect the unrest around Windows' AI/adware enshittification and the forced deprecation of Windows 10 are casting a shadow on everything Microsoft-ish at the moment, too.
[1] The original Twitter thread that brought this up as a concept is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html. This is in the context of digital media outlets, but I think it's easy to see how it can apply more broadly. There are some other articles out there for the searching if you're interested.
Are there any alternatives to Github that offer similar bang for the buck? Particularly for very small teams or solo devs that need private repos? The author here specifically mentions Codeberg, which seems like it's just for FOSS projects.
What is the value of the social network? I discover code by looking for a package in my language via a search engine. Whether it’s GitHub/GitLab/Gittea/etc doesn’t matter as long as it’s indexed by the search engine.
Stick with Github if it solves your problem. No particular reason to move off, only reasons I've seen so far is "don't like Microsoft" and "Don't like the UI". But overall, GitHub is the leading tech in this space. For FOSS, I can see why some may want to move off, but for commercial work, it's great. Seems to be a bit of a bandwagon of articles of people moving off hitting hackernews (which in reality represents a tiny percentage of users), no need to hop on the bandwagon unless you have some compelling reasons for something else.
Does Codeberg provide free CI runners? I'd estimate Microsoft spends over $100m/year on free Github CI. Likely their biggest cost. It doesn't seem like a reasonable thing Codeberg to fund for free.
You can use your own Woodpecker instance with Codeberg. I do this at work and privately and it works great and is much faster than the free CI that Codeberg can afford.
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
Honestly I think the mention of environmental costs has likely made users hesitant to sign up. Mentioning it costs real money is reasonable. Mentioning the environmental costs is not; the environmental harm is equivalent to the population buying a few dozen extra cars, which can easily be influenced by random marketing decisions by automakers and dealers.
In my experience reprimanding tech savvy people for the environmental costs of compute just doesn’t work. It’s far better to rephrase things into performance optimization problems, which naturally pique engineers’ interest.
What really stands out to me in this migration story isn't the technical side at all, but the reminder that "feature parity" isn't the real hurdle here. Codeberg is already good enough for most day to day workflows; what it doesn't have is the gravitational pull GitHub built through network effects, integrations, and plain old inertia.
This is partially being addressed by projects like https://tangled.org. It's built on the same protocol as bluesky, meaning your identity is preserved across different platforms so that _where_ your git is hosted is unrelated to how you discover and connect with others.
And just sheer amount of documentation and examples out there. Everyone uses it, therefore everyone writes about it, the new hire probably knows it, and if they don't they can find it easily.
Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad, you don't need whole team to know exactly how to write it, you just need to have a person knowing it. and it's generally not all that hard to learn.
My primary pain point with Codeberg has been that the issue search is worse, so that there are cases where I'm rather certain than issue exists-- because I've triaged it in the past-- but it's hard to find with the keyboard search. Hopefully that can be improved soon.
There were some times were Codeberg's general performance was noticeably worse, but most recently it has been fine.
If you thinking of migrating a project with hundreds of issues, I would do a test migration and practice a few different searches to test the result quality.
typedload was the most difficult because I test it on multiple versions of python, but woodpeckerCI does its job so I can still run the tests even after the migration.
For the other projects I have I didn't bother to set up a CI since it's trivial to run locally.
But I'm sort of disappointed the end result doesn't seem like it's any better for users? (not blaming the author)
The benefits for the maintainer are also mostly philosophical... Which is a shame
I just tried Codeberg
- I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls
- The login with Github is hidden behind a minuscule drop down arrow. Seemingly intentionally obscured.. either have the option clearly, or don't have it at all..
- the format is identical to github with zero improvements to layout. It still has the README at the bottom, where you have to scroll past a billion files to even see what the project is about. Ex: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Why not just make the README the landing page, and then the file tree a separate tab? Or some horizontal side-by-side layout
Blindly copying the market leader and offering nothing new .. just doesn't seem like a winning strategy? It either indicates a lack of imagination or initiative. This space has some very clear room for improvements..
I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place.
Codeberg is a fork of Gitea, itself a fork of Gogs.
Both forks originated for "philosophical" reasons, not technical ones and Joe Chen (@unknwon on GH) deserves a lot of the merit for building a clean forge in Go mostly by himself.
I have once migrated my repositories to Codeberg, but have moved back to GitHub.
While I despise a lot of features on GitHub, Codeberg is sadly lacking the gravitational pull and visibility. I know, someone has to start, but as a single maintainer I need collaboration to keep the projects alive.
codeberg is supposely noscript/basic (x)html browser friendly, IPv6 too, I guess.
microsoft github broke slowly and surely all interop with classic browsers (now you must have a "whatng" cartel web engine to even post an issue).
(I was told that codeberg may have dropped noscript/basic (x)html interop, which would make it no more interesting than microsoft github or whatng gitlab)
codeberg people have to be careful and acknowledge the following: expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin it because you are stepping on big tech toes. 99% of the time you will spend on codeberg will have to be to protect it and to keep it available, 1% (if not less) will be forge coding.
Any experience with Codeberg + F-Droid after migrating from Github? I.e., is it possible to have F-Droid auto-detect releases on Codeberg like it does on Github?
39 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 52.8 ms ] threadIs there any recent event or broader trend that explains this shift?
Everything else not important to them.
I don't really have a choice but to use Windows and Visual Studio 2022 for work, but I've dusted off my Sublime Text license and have been eyeing migrating my personal repositories to Codeberg.
I think it remains to be seen how large this moment actually is, but it's something I've been thinking about re: GitHub for a while now. Also, I suspect the unrest around Windows' AI/adware enshittification and the forced deprecation of Windows 10 are casting a shadow on everything Microsoft-ish at the moment, too.
[1] The original Twitter thread that brought this up as a concept is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html. This is in the context of digital media outlets, but I think it's easy to see how it can apply more broadly. There are some other articles out there for the searching if you're interested.
Gittea for self hosting is something I always wanted to try.
I think I was looking for something like Migadu[1] for git hosting. Cheap, private and for personal use. The best option is probably to self host.
I tried to fish out some ideas with an ASK HN thread but it did not get any attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011054
I have started putting my new stuff in Codeberg. Some of the private projects have manually update private mirrors on GCP (free so far).
[1] https://migadu.com/pricing/
> Running CI/CD pipelines can use significant amounts of energy. As much as it is tempting to have green checkmarks everywhere, running the jobs costs real money and has environmental costs.
Honestly I think the mention of environmental costs has likely made users hesitant to sign up. Mentioning it costs real money is reasonable. Mentioning the environmental costs is not; the environmental harm is equivalent to the population buying a few dozen extra cars, which can easily be influenced by random marketing decisions by automakers and dealers.
In my experience reprimanding tech savvy people for the environmental costs of compute just doesn’t work. It’s far better to rephrase things into performance optimization problems, which naturally pique engineers’ interest.
Then again maybe for stuff like actions and in general CI/CD it's not all that bad, you don't need whole team to know exactly how to write it, you just need to have a person knowing it. and it's generally not all that hard to learn.
There were some times were Codeberg's general performance was noticeably worse, but most recently it has been fine.
If you thinking of migrating a project with hundreds of issues, I would do a test migration and practice a few different searches to test the result quality.
typedload was the most difficult because I test it on multiple versions of python, but woodpeckerCI does its job so I can still run the tests even after the migration.
For the other projects I have I didn't bother to set up a CI since it's trivial to run locally.
But I'm sort of disappointed the end result doesn't seem like it's any better for users? (not blaming the author)
The benefits for the maintainer are also mostly philosophical... Which is a shame
I just tried Codeberg
- I get constant "Making sure you're not a bot!" anime girls
- The login with Github is hidden behind a minuscule drop down arrow. Seemingly intentionally obscured.. either have the option clearly, or don't have it at all..
- the format is identical to github with zero improvements to layout. It still has the README at the bottom, where you have to scroll past a billion files to even see what the project is about. Ex: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot Why not just make the README the landing page, and then the file tree a separate tab? Or some horizontal side-by-side layout
Blindly copying the market leader and offering nothing new .. just doesn't seem like a winning strategy? It either indicates a lack of imagination or initiative. This space has some very clear room for improvements..
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1786
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061
[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
Both forks originated for "philosophical" reasons, not technical ones and Joe Chen (@unknwon on GH) deserves a lot of the merit for building a clean forge in Go mostly by himself.
While I despise a lot of features on GitHub, Codeberg is sadly lacking the gravitational pull and visibility. I know, someone has to start, but as a single maintainer I need collaboration to keep the projects alive.
https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/ for some more fresh ones.
I kind of wish there was a better collection of these.
(I was told that codeberg may have dropped noscript/basic (x)html interop, which would make it no more interesting than microsoft github or whatng gitlab)
codeberg people have to be careful and acknowledge the following: expect shadowpaid hackers to ruin it because you are stepping on big tech toes. 99% of the time you will spend on codeberg will have to be to protect it and to keep it available, 1% (if not less) will be forge coding.