Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

https://unterwaditzer.net/2025/codeberg.html

Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people - Markus Unterwaditzer

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work.

Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter.

Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote. That is what murders the impression of a product like codeberg.

Sorry, just being frank. I want all competitors to large monopolies to succeed, but I also want to be able to do my job/passion.

My own git server has been hit severely by scrapers. They're scraping everything. Commits, comparisons between commits, api calls for files, everything.

And pretty much all of them, ByteDance, OpenAI, AWS, Claude, various I couldn't recognize. I basically just had to block all of them to get reasonable performance for a server running on a mini-pc.

I was going to move to codeberg at some point, but they had downtime when I was considering it, I'd rather deal with that myself then.

Anyone actually scraping git repos would probably just do a 'git clone'. Crawling git hosts is extremely expensive, as git servers have always been inadvertent crawler traps.

They generate a URL for every version of every file on every commit and every branch and tag, and if that wasn't enough, n(n+1)/2 git diffs for every file on every commit it has exited on. Even a relatively small git repo with a few hundred files and commit explodes into millions of URLs in the crawl frontier. Server side many of these are very expensive to generate as well so it's really not a fantastic interaction, crawler and git host.

If you run a web crawler, you need to add git host detection to actively avoid walking into them.

And yet, it's exactly what all the AI companies are doing. However much it costs them in server costs and good will seems to be worth less to them then the engineering time to special case the major git web UIs.