Migrating Away from GitHub

After 17 years on GitHub, I have made the difficult decision to migrate from GitHub to a SciActive hosted instance of Forgejo.

It’s not exactly a secret that GitHub has been having a rough time, recently. More importantly, GitHub seems to be playing a bit fast and loose with its users’ data, with regard to AI. These things have concerned me enough that I strongly feel it’s time to move away from GitHub. I am proud of the software that I write, and it’s all written by humans, without the help of AI. Port87 has a strong stance against the use of AI in email and software development.

SciActive software will now be hosted and developed on a custom instance of Forgejo at https://forge.sciactive.com.

We have already migrated all of the Port87 code and infrastructure (these are private repositories, so they are not visible to the public). We will be migrating our remaining repositories slowly over the next several months. The open source repositories will remain on GitHub as mirrors, but issue tracking and pull requests will all be handled on the SciActive Forge. We have configured our forge to allow users to log in with both a GitHub and a GitLab account, which should allow us to remain accessible to the open source community we have served for over a decade.

This move allows us to maintain full control over even more of our infrastructure. At this point, we have very few outside services that we rely on, which allows us to remain online even when large service providers experience outages. This also helps us better maintain our users privacy. Having confidential information (like production SSH keys and environment configuration files) remain only on our on-premise servers allows us to ensure that information, along with our users’ personal information, remains private.

GitHub has been a wonderful provider, and I don’t want this announcement to be perceived as me throwing any shade toward them. I still think GitHub is a great company, I just personally disagree with the direction they have decided to pursue. Thank you to everyone at GitHub for the work you do.

I've been thinking about how to word this correctly for a while. #Port87 #Email does not use #AI, and we have no plans to.

The reasons for this decision are laid out in the article, but basically I don't think that email is an appropriate place for AI, even if it's somewhat useful. It introduces too big of a security risk to justify what little it can offer.

https://sciactive.com/2026/01/21/our-stance-on-ai-in-email/

Our Stance on AI in Email

Port87 does not use your email to train AI. Port87 also does not use AI to read your email. We do not use AI in the development of Port87. Port87’s code is written by real people, and much of it is open source.

We do not use AI for a number of reasons:

• Training AI on private email content can leak private information. It is possible to craft a prompt to retrieve verbatim copies of real emails used to train them.
• Using AI to read email can introduce security vulnerabilities. Agentic AI can be targeted using a technique called “prompt injection” to divulge private information to malicious third parties.
• AI is prone to hallucinations and inaccurate results.
• AI generated code is unreliable, unmaintainable, and prone to security vulnerabilities.
• AI generated code may infringe on the copyrights of the developers whose code was used to train the AI. In fact, testing has shown that AI generated code has already infringed on our copyrights.
• AI does not provide enough value to justify its astronomical cost, both monetary and environmental. In fact, we struggle to see any value AI provides, considering the real threat of security vulnerabilities and inaccuracies.

We value your privacy, and we do not and will not mess around with unproven and unreliable technologies when your privacy is on the line. As such, we currently have no plans to introduce any features that rely on large language models or any other kind of generative AI.

If you are currently using an email provider that offers such features, we strongly encourage you to switch to a provider that doesn’t.

Photo by cottonbro studio.

Celebrate New Payment Methods with 50% Off

Port87 now supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, and many other payment methods through Stripe!

To celebrate, we’re giving 50% off your first 12 months! Use code YAYSTRIPE50 at checkout. This code will be available for the next month.

If you have a PayPal subscription, don’t worry, it will continue to work. Feel free to cancel it and resubscribe with Stripe to enjoy the 50% discount, though.

#port87

#Port87 now uses Stripe for payments! No more PayPal!!! I should’ve been using it from the beginning. It’s so much better than PayPal in every way.

https://port87.com

I just spent the past 13 hours optimizing my #Postgres database.

The result for query to load the emails (when you have tens of thousands in your account) when you first open #Port87

Before: 0.370 seconds
After: 0.050 seconds

All index scans, no bitmap heap scans. Woo!