Article URL: https://www.howtogeek.com/why-developers-are-ditching-github-for-codeberg-and-self-hosting-alternatives/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 Po…

By many measures, GitHub is as popular as ever. One new user joins every second, the service hosts over 600 million repositories, and nearly one billion commits were made in 2025. But scratch the surface, and something else is going on. Some users are concerned about a range of issues, from technical problems like frequent downtime to the service’s political direction, especially since it was taken over by Microsoft. A few high-profile projects have taken things much further, abandoning the offering altogether, in a move that may represent the beginnings of a more widespread exodus. When you’re searching for open-source software, it can seem like every project is hosted on GitHub. Even the Linux kernel source code has a read-only GitHub mirror, although its main home has a domain of its own. But this isn’t always the case, and it may become less and less so if moves by a handful of projects become a wider trend. Probably the highest-profile departure so far has been Ghostty, a cross-platform terminal emulator. The project’s maintainer, Mitchell Hashimoto, announced in April 2026 that Ghostty was leaving GitHub, although not immediately: It'll take us time to remove all of our dependencies on GitHub and we have a plan in place to do it as incrementally as possible. We plan on keeping a read-only mirror available on GitHub at the current URL. Zig, a system programming language that’s a spiritual successor to C, also announced its departure, back in November 2025. The project made its first commit back in 2015, and enjoyed an uninterrupted run on GitHub, until recently.