- Leaving GitHub
I’m trying to reduce my reliance on the increasingly unstable United States of America and move to more ethically run services. As part of that, I’m moving from GitHub. I’ve been steadily moving off GitHub for months. I’ve moved lots of site hosting off of GitHub Pages, removed GitHub-based comments from this site, and have been rearchitecting systems to avoid being GitHub-specific.
Unfortunately moving to another Git forge is a big effort – in part due to choice. Though I am comfortable and capable of self-hosting, I don’t want to have to self-host my Git forge. That isn’t a maintenance burden I want, and unless federated, it adds unwanted friction for contributors.
GitLab: I’ve been on GitLab for ages. It is pretty fully featured but has an identical vibe to GitHub. If they had the chance, I think they’d make the exact same mistakes.
SourceHut: So complicated yet so lacking of comfort features. The interface is too finicky and email workflows are clunky.
Gitea: A tad shady for my liking.
Forgejo: Fantastic, but I don’t want to self-host.
Codeberg: Pretty good hosted version of Forgejo, and I’d probably be happy with it.
I’ve ended up with Tangled. Tangled is built on the AT Protocol, which is nice given my adoption of the ecosystem. However, it also introduces my biggest gripe, which is the lack of private repositories, meaning I won’t be able to leave GitHub entirely. I very much do like that you can self-host Git repositories with ‘knots’ and CI runners with ‘spindles’, allowing better data portability in future. Simple repo migration is also on the roadmap.
Tangled also unfortunately isn’t supported by a lot of build tools and systems I use, which is a shame from the perspective of ease-of-use. I won’t be able to make a full migration until Tangled adds support for releases and private repositories and until other services get support for Tangled, but I’ve already moved over what I can. Most notably, I’ve moved my Stoat bots.