How GitHub monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

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ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html

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Why not codeberg?

^please ^donate

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Codeberg took down my torrent projects I put on there. They cited german anti-piracy laws as the reason.

Not saying they’re not better than github of course, but they aren’t the real solution and will comply fully with german law. The solution decentralized issue tracking via forgejo or something.

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Missed opportunity to say “Why not Codeberg?”

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This has been in the article though, among other alternatives.

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Github has really turned to shit. Almost every time I try to search for something I get the too many requests error even if it’s the first time I’ve visited the site in a week.

It would be nice if people could self host something like Forgejo, but the damn AI crawlers will just hammer your server until it crashes. The crawlers are really hard to block without relying on another big tech company like Cloudflare.

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It’s hard to host anything public without relying on something like cloudflare.

But, what makes you say it’s “ai crawlers” rather than conventional botnets and so on? Very few organisations have the resources to train large ai models, but the resources needed to run a botnet or something are much lower.

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The botnets usually try to login to SSH and pages like phpmyadmin & wp-admin looking for something they can infect rather than scraping every single page on a website frequently. Unless you do something to become the target of a DDoS attack or don’t secure your server, they usually aren’t much more than a source of log spam.

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Because the 1000 requests/10 minutes on my server are done by AmazonBot, mostly. Followed by ASNs from Huawei, Azure and the like.

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If big tech are the issue, then try this robots.txt (yes on github…): https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

My issue is with the scrapers pretending to be something they aren’t. Tens of thousands of requests, spread over IPs, mostly from China and Singapore but increasingly from South America.

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AmazonBot follows robots.txt. I don’t so what Huawei and Azure ASNs have to do with it - that sounds like those requests simply come from inside a Huawei and an Azure network, respectively, but could otherwise be anything.

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I actually was in an argument with idiots the other day saying search engines never took down sites. 

The vast majority of people just regurgitate what they hear and suits their world view.

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He just repeats what he heard elsewhere, he doesn’t really understand what the words mean, just fancy text prediction

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We really need something like https://forgefed.org/ !

Running all our own forgejo instance is well and good but this the strengh of github is not in it’s feature but rather it’s because it offer the largest platform. Using a federation protocol would allow users to contribute without needing one account per instances.

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To be honest, I’m starting to drink the Sourcehut coolaid here. We have a distributed method of interacting with repositories: Email.

Don’t get me wrong, the current user experience of email-based patches and discussion isn’t great because it’s too easy to send a badly formatted patch. But if we invested time in making email patches easier to use (e.g. sending them through a web ui for people who prefer github style PRs) then we could skip all the architectural pains of solutions like forgefed.

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I don’t know if email is a good solution. Having contributed to the linux kernel ( in 2010ish ) may have distorted my perception of the gitmail workflow but it doesn’t seems very accesible and i can’t possibly see a change allowing this to be usable by semi-technical users.

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The change would be using Gitmail as the plumbing, and normalising the creation of user-friendly porcelain on top.

E.g. suppose there is a repo foo/bar hosted by a forgejo instance at myinstance.org/foo/bar. Sending an email to foo.bar@myinstance.org (or similar) could automatically create a PR and, conversely, opening a PR could send a patch series to the foo/bar mailing list.

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one of my things with the federation is I would like a login to be able to be used with different things. log into peertube with lemmy credentials and such.

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This is already somewhat possible if your instance support an OIDC solution, you could create one account and use it as login everywhere as long as it’s host by the same people.

For example I use authentik to create accounts and with OIDC my users can login to jellyfin, nextcloud, vaultwarden, forgejo, …

But that would mean putting all your eggs in one instance.

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the egg basket thing is not much of an issue for me. I think having to remake an account is something that is just going to be reality with the federation. Backing up settings is the biggest thing to me to make that a bit less painful.

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Maybe something like radicle?

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Yep yep yep. I have forgejo accounts on so many instances (including on my own, 2-person instance which hosts all my personal shit). I’d love to be able to jump into discussions and open PRs on other people’s forges without needing a new account.

Forgejo in particular is just a fantastic forge. It’s surprisingly feature-rich, and so, so fast compared to GitHub, even on very lowspecced hardware. I honestly think that if federation is properly implemented, then in the long run, GitHub will become obsolete for FOSS projects.

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Sadly github will continue to exist due to being where contributors are and being easy to find. I hope projects mirrors to forgejo as much as possible noneless.

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That’s what I’m not so sure about though. Forgejo/codeberg/… projects are already not hard to find through search engines. Add a federated in-forgejo search and you’d be set there.

And currently the problem indeed is that a forgejo project is on instance X, and you, as a developer only have accounts on Y and Z. But through federation, that would stop mattering, so I don’t get the “it’s where contributors are": as long as contributors have a single forgejo account anywhere, we’d be good.

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Monocultures are almost always bad.

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It is really easy to mirror git repos though, which makes this less of an issue than most other monopolies

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True, but filling bugs, making pull requests, reviewing them and links to between projects ports much worse between forges.

To be fair, I think that is mostly a failure of git to take in these features to free them from the forges. Maybe radicle had a chance of fixing that, but…

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Fossil does, but it follows a very different FOSS deveopment style, The Cathedral Style (Git follows the Bazaar style)

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Yeah, and I think that nothing that is not git compatible has any chance

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Fossil can export it’s repos to git & import repos from git

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Have I missed something? Does that mean I can use fossil to work on and contribute to git based projects seamlessly?

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It’s more like; you can maintain a mirror of your fossil project.

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Projects lose things like issue tracking, discussions which are not git features.

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Just selfhost your apps folks

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See it as a mirror and not full issue tracking.

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I hate when I see github links. I have to open them in a private window because they wrecked my account by requiring 2fa and later claiming that there was something wrong with my email address. Worthless site.

Not to mention, MicroShaft being in charge of github is like the fox being in charge of the chicken coop.

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Deleted. Thanks for the reminder!

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I made a similar post like this: https://sopuli.xyz/post/34152096

The article mentioned in this post talks about alternatives like Fossil, Pijul & Darcs

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Comments in Opensource@programming.dev

I wish more would use self hosted solutions like Forgejo (or a gitweb if they don’t need a complex system) and simply mirror their projects on codeberg and github for the exposure.

Gentoo apparently do it that way already:
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/
https://codeberg.org/gentoo/gentoo (mirror)
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo (mirror)

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I also like how they’re doing it, definitely the way to go

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thats actually smart for small projects, your selfhost is the source of true and you take advantage of github for exposure and backups

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please everyone get the fuck off shithub kthnks

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If only there was some other choice

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Comments in Programming@programming.dev

https://forgejo.org/

Would be nice to see federated PRs. Git is distributed after all!

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Deleted by author

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This looks neat, so the repositories are distributed across the people who run the radicale nodes? I’ve been self hosting forgejo for a while, wouldn’t mind trying this out just for fun.

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I know the solution. Starting this year, students will be forced to contribute to a project they use, care about or, at the very least, truly want to use in the long term. Not one they found randomly on Github.

And they’re still going to find things on GitHub. Because so many things are on GitHub.

They’re blaming the students for the popularity of GitHub. If they want students to not use GitHub then just make that a requirement.

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PSA: GitHub does not have a monopoly, you are free to host your stuff elsewhere (or yourself)

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Google “network effect”

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Relatively minor for source code forges.

The reasons everyone uses GitHub:

  • Free, even for private repos. No ads.
  • Free CI - this is huge. Nobody else does this because it costs Microsoft around $100m/year to provide.
  • It’s quite good.

If anyone can ever compete with that then I doubt network effects will keep people there.

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Codeberg has free CI if your project has a FOSS license and a readme: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests#woodpecker-ci

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They’re clearly not going to be able to afford $100m/year in free CI.

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Which is one of the reasons behind github’s network effect.

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That’s not a network effect.

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Yes, and for most of us it’s easy to do so, but I’m not going to explain a noob how to add new repositories. I mean, I did, and I will do in the future, but it’s not my favorite task to do.

I realized my comment was a bit ambiguous. I meant repositories like for Maven, NPM, or package managers. Having stuff on GitHub makes it a lot easier.

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Terrible title. The article is about the risks of everyone using GitHub. That doesn’t mean GitHub is destroying the open source ecosystem. In fact it’s the complete opposite - GitHub massively helps the open source ecosystem. That’s why everyone uses it in the first place!

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Not quite. GitHub used to help the open source ecosystem. Since it’s been taken over by Micro$lop it’s gradually been shifting towards exploiting it.

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Maybe slightly, but it’s still way on the helping side.

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Sounds more like it became a trojan horse.

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