More and more projects are moving to Codeberg, and I'm wondering; at what point will a critical mass be reached? Or will we end up with a fragmented ecosystem?
Lack of investment more like. There are a ton of simple and obvious bugs that have persisted well before the AI crazy, e.g. this annoying bug from 2021: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/6874
That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
In other news today, Bun, which is one of the biggest projects written in Zig, joined Anthropic, the company behind Claude Code, and has nothing but kind words to say about AI. If Zig becomes ever more hostile to AI, I wonder if there may be some "friction" there.
Last week the reason for the move was MS tools being used by the baddies. Today AI is the baddie du jour. To use a great quote "either do or don't, but I got places to be".
IMHO, the main advantage of github is that it is an ecosystem. This is a well-thought-out Swiss knife: a pioneering (but no longer new) PR system, convenient issues, as well as a well-formed CI system with many developed actions and free runners. In addition, it is best to use code navigation simply in a web browser. You write code, and almost everything works effortlessly. Having a sponsorship system is also great, you don't have to search for external donation platforms and post weird links in your profile/repository.
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
One thing that's really nice about codeberg is how fast the pages load. Browsing GitHub often feels very sluggish. Obviously there's a difference in scale there, but I hope codeberg can keep being fast.
Zig is distributed under the MIT License. MS is completely with in their rights to clone the git repository from Codeberg and do whatever with the source code. Including feeding it to their AI algorithms. Moving it to Codeberg doesn't really fix that. I get that some people want to restrict what people can do with source code (including using it for capitalist purposes or indeed ai/machine learning). But the whole point of many open source licenses (and especially the MIT license) is actually the opposite: allowing people to do whatever they want with the source code.
The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they feel strongly about that.
I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do have questions about the funding model. Running all this on donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg seems structured to be more resilient against that.
Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now possible.
Google workspace will have me do the same. No, I don't want to 'generate an image' I just want to use my own, thank you. They give their AI prime billing everywhere to the detriment of the products and the users.
I totally agree, Microsoft is ruining everything with AI, like all Microsoft product have been on decline for years even before the LLM era, and now they are on an even steeper decline.
it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives, it’s not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to it.
The main function of GitHub is really just advertising or at least broadcasting your work. I would use GitHub issues, stars, etc as an (imperfect gauge) of the quality of a library. This is not because of GitHub's features, just that it's the biggest and most well known. And yes I know buying stars is a thing, which is why it's part of the evaluation and not the whole ballgame.
Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense that this is less of a concern for them when migrating away.
This resonates with me. Last week I got stuck on a bug where GitHub actions was pulling ARMv7 docker images when I specifically requested ARMv8. Absolutely impossible to reproduce locally either.
I hate these constant drama posts, but I am all for seeing competition. I think it's good to have a couple of top-tier companies offering the same service, and especially with git, it's been... lacklustre outside of Github, I'd say. Bitbucket was totally nice, but Atlassian and Jira and meh... Github has (mostly) steered clear of cross-product promotions until the CoPilot era washed all over us, and I wonder for how long they can continue to thrive off the power of brand-awareness.
Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
I don't get it, why did they allow GitHub bot to modify and merge pull request automatically? Yeah I agree that MS is ruining everything with AI, but this problem is avoidable, if they turn off the bot's auto merge feature, or turn it off completely. The reason they move to a lesser known Git provider sounds more like a marketing stunt.
LLMs are useful, but AI is itself a marketing term that has begun to lose its luster. It’s rapidly becoming an annoying or trendy label, not a cutting edge one.
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos.
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
I think once Codeberg becomes federated, it will likely attract a lot of people.
Right now 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).
If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of them.
The edit history of the announcement is quite a ride:
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
Nice that they cleaned it up, but Andrew has a pattern of coming across across as even less mentally stable than the Notepad++ dev, which isn't a good look for a BDFL. For example, he randomly broke down in tears during a presentation not long ago.
that's a long time between edits. as a single contributor to my own posts, i usually achieve a like iteration within minutes. did they have to have a board meeting in between the changes? lovely conservative process. "rookies", love it
Maybe this is a nice chance to ask, would you move from Gitlab to Github? I would say no, but some people in my org are proposing it, it seems to me simply because the integration it has with AI tools, but my experience has been worse in Github than with Gitlab.
72 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadMigrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg - 883 comments
This one is almost a one-line change (technically they need an extra flag in the YAML but that's hardly difficult): https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/12882#discussi...
That said, I still think Github is fine, and you can't argue with free CI - especially on Windows/Mac. If they ever stop that I'll definitely consider Codeberg. Or if Codeberg gets support for stacked PRs (i.e. dependencies between PRs), then I'm there! So frustrating that Github doesn't support such an obvious workflow.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343
https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
All in one, that's why developers like it so much. The obsession with AI makes me nervous, but the advantages still outweigh, as for me, the average developer. For now.
Edit: Scrolling comments I see something called Codeberg but why am I getting connection refused?
Another edit: Oh because Codeberg is down. I had to look at another thread on the frontpage to find that out...
The people at Zig should use proper CI tools and not something that a big service provider is offering as an afterthought.
The Zig attitude towards AI usage is a bit odd in my view. I don't think it's that widely shared. But good for them if they feel strongly about that.
I'm kind of intrigued by Codeberg. I had never heard of it until a few days ago and it seems like that's happening in Berlin where I live. I don't think I would want to use it for commercial projects but it looks fine for open source things. Though I do have questions about the funding model. Running all this on donations seems like it could have some issues long term for more serious projects. Moving OSS communities around can be kind of disruptive. And it probably rules out commercial usage.
This whole Github is evil anti-capitalist stance is IMHO a bit out of place. I'm fine with diversity and having more players in the market though; that's a good thing. But many of the replacements are also for profit companies; which is probably why many people are a bit disillusioned with e.g. Gitlab. Codeberg seems structured to be more resilient against that.
Otherwise, Github remains good value and I'm getting a lot of value out of for profit AI companies providing me with stuff that was clearly trained on the body of work stored inside of it. I'm even paying for that. I think it's cool that this is now possible.
done.
it makes me sad to see that github is now going through the same shit, and people are using other random half-ass alternatives, it’s not easy to keep track of your favourite open-source projects across many source forgeries. we need someone to buy github from Microsoft and remove all the crap they have added to it.
Now that zig is fairly well known and trusted, it makes sense that this is less of a concern for them when migrating away.
Same effect at play watching all the top-tier AI corps under heavy competitive fire still, trying hard to keep the audience attached while battling to stay on top of (or keep up with) the competition. This mainly (for now) benefits the user. If OpenAI were to trailblaze on their own, we'd all be paying through the roof for even the most basic GPT by now.
I guarantee that in ~24 months, most AI features will still remain in some form or another on most apps, but the marketing language of AI-first will have evaporated entirely.
Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-u...
Quotes from their website:
Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740).
Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch...
[...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path.
[...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try!
[...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries.
Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not be a good thing.
Right now 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).
If a federated layer is applied to these github alternatives, you could have an account in Codeberg, and be able to track lots of projects wherever people want to host them. Right now, I see a lot of forgejo servers, but I don't want to register in all of them.
> [2025-11-27T02:10:07Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining losers eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [1]
> [2025-11-27T14:04:47Z] it’s abundantly clear that the talented folks who used to work on the product have moved on to bigger and better things, with the remaining rookies eager to inflict some kind of bloated, buggy JavaScript framework on us in the name of progress [2]
> [2025-11-28T09:21:12Z] it’s abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub’s success is no longer driving it [3]
---
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127021007/https://ziglang.o...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20251127140447/https://ziglang.o...
3: https://web.archive.org/web/20251128092112/https://ziglang.o...
GitHub is critical infrastructure for many projects and pushing AI slop is not acceptable.
They have the money to pay for quality development time.