GitHub & Code Hosting

I just want to open a discussion here regarding github.

These days, github’s availability has been in the gutter. I have been finding it difficult to get any work done whenever I need to do things as simple as read the code to see how certain things are implemented, as github just won’t load pages sometimes

Lately I haven’t been doing much maintainer work, but I can imagine that the experience is even worse for anyone who is.

I am genuinely considering hosting my own code forge just so I can easily mirror repos to browse them.

I think it would be a good idea to start at least looking at migration options for alternatives to github.
I would personally recommend going with either codeberg or hosting a forgejo instance (the software codeberg is based on), however gitlab is also a viable option.

Obviously, I don’t expect anything to happen soon, nor do I even expect that my post will necessarily incite the change, as this would be a massive change and requires a lot of thought & work before it can happen, I just want to bring it up to maybe get some people thinking about it

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We have, courtesy of @nuclearsandwich and his paranoia, some extensive thoughts around how we would respond to waking up one day and thinking, “oh :face_with_symbols_on_mouth: we need to move away from github asap”, including what the triggers might look like. We don’t have a fully-thought-through process, nor do we have explicit binary triggers that would cause us to move, but the recent GitHub uptime problems have brought it back to mind for me.

As you say, a move away from GitHub would be a huge undertaking and would not happen overnight. Rest assured that when we start thinking about it seriously, we will let the community know.

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if you had to move away from github, what would you move to instead?

codeberg/forgejo as I suggestes, gitlab, or maybe something else?

Personally I would prefer to move to Codeberg, because it is run by a non-profit and so their ideals align well with ours. We would have to do a proper impartial investigation of the options at the time, though.

We absolutely would not try hosting our own forgejo instance except as a last resort. We do not have the necessary resources to make that a viable solution, and even if we did, I have many other priorities to use those resources on.

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is there a chance that there would be a pilot project sometime in the future which starts maybe with mirroring repos to codeberg, so the main development still happens on github, just to try it out and see how things go?

I definitely think that codeberg & forgejo still have some things I’d like to see improved (namely, code search & forgefed), but there may be other things that you’d notice if you started with mirroring to codeberg

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