There was an article about moving to Codeberg on the orange website yesterday, and out of interest to get an impression of what average programmers think of the idea of moving, I took at look at the comments. (Yeah, I know …)
I’m going to write here my thoughts on a general impression of the comment thread as a whole. (Rather than respond to individuals.)
To begin by addressing what seemed to be a misconception underlying a lot of the comments:
Codeberg, the website, does not aim to replace GitHub. We poke fun at their recent foibles in our PR sometimes, but we do not want to become them.
We do not want to replace one single point of failure with another! (Admittedly, I think Codeberg.org, run by a non-profit, as SPOF would be better than GitHub.com, run by Microsoft, as an SPOF, but that’s not the goal!)
We are much more excited by the idea of creating an ecosystem of forges (and different forge software) than in becoming the new one place where absolutely everything is hosted.
I am, for example, very pleased that even while switching to Forgejo, Fedora decided to keep on self-hosting rather than jumping to us.
To be clear, we’re open for everyone who needs us, especially individuals working on their own smaller projects. But other forges are our friends, not our competition
Forge federation is something we’re actively pushing for because of this. Full federation support is still a few years ahead of us, probably, but you can already set up your own forge in a way that minimizes inconvenience to users by using Codeberg as a single sign-on provider for a self-hosted forge.
https://git.madhouse-project.org/, which hosts the Iocaine project, is a great example of this. If you set up Codeberg as SSO for your own site, almost all of our content rules are irrelevant to you.
(If someone’s forge were hosting completely objectionable, hateful content we might choose to turn their OAuth support off. But, for example, you can have as many private and non-free repositories as you like that way. More on that in a bit though …)
(Furthermore, this thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)
Apart from that, many people listed things that GitHub provides for free which Codeberg doesn’t provide or requires self-hosting for. The biggest one was CI, but there were other things too.
And I think the only way I can respond to that is by talking about the fundamentally different organizational models that GitHub and Codeberg have – not to plead on our smaller size, but to plead on principles.
Microsoft is a for-profit company. They have attracted a lot of projects to them by giving away free goodies, like an immense amount of computing power for CI, and over the years have increased the amount of stuff you get for free. (Not long ago you had to pay for personal private repos …)
By continuously sweetening the deal for smaller users, then getting orgs to pay once they start needing collaboration features, GitHub built up over a billion dollars in revenue per year (as of 2022).
Microsoft’s shareholders are probably very pleased about this.
But if Microsoft needs to please its shareholders and turn the revenue dial up a bit again (say, because they’ve got themselves tied up in a huge economic bubble, and need to bolster the bottom line after it pops), they might choose to take away some of those free goodies.
In fact, it’s not just a hypothetical – they started doing that just recently. https://web.archive.org/web/20260223084443/https://github.com/resources/insights/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions
Those changes are ‘postponed’, but assume they will come.
Codeberg is different.
Codeberg is a non-profit.
Moreover, it is a *democratic* non-profit. You can (and, if you actively use Codeberg, should) become a member and you will have an equal vote and a fair say in the running of the association, and in any decisions we make about what to offer and what not to offer.
This democratic right is guaranteed to you not only by our constitution, but by German law, which guarantees that the membership as a whole has the ultimate decision-making power.
So no, we don’t offer massive CI resources, unlimited repo quotas, etc.
What we offer is different: if self-hosting isn’t for you, but you still want to know that your repo hosting is not at the whims of Microsoft’s bottom line, Codeberg is for you.
If the Codeberg service you depend on goes away, it won’t be from one day to the next in order to boost our income. We will warn you about the reasons, ask you and the other members what you think, and you’ll have a chance to change things.
And I have a positive example for this, too: our Pages service was going to go away because nobody wanted to maintain it any more.
But we asked the community, and they really wanted a Pages service.
So a heroic volunteer (thank you @whitequark) stepped up to write us new infrastructure, and our infra team found the time and motivation to work on patching up the existing infra. And now the future of Codeberg Pages is safe – because the community told us they wanted it.
There are limitations that come with being a non-profit association in Germany.
Something that was mentioned in the thread is why don’t we let people and organizations pay for more resources. One answer – apart from the fact that we’ve only just reached the size where we start to get such requests – is that, under our current legal form, we can’t really do this. A non-profit association cannot offer commercial services.
There are a couple of options being explored here:
1. We *could* maybe offer some things like increased quotas to association members. That has been mentioned before as a possibility but no action towards this has been taken yet afaik.
2. Some interested members of Codeberg have, in their private capacity, been investigating offering e.g. a hosted CI runner service that would have seamless integration with Codeberg.
Nothing solid on either front yet, though.
In general, I think Codeberg stands for a future in which people are a lot more suspicious of free goodies given to the FOSS community by for-profit companies.
But it also stands for a world in which self-hosting is not the only practical alternative to the present situation. We stand for community-run infrastructure, volunteering to provide a common good, and making decisions for the benefit of all.
Some other people were concerned about our uptime in comparison to GitHub. Fortunately, GitHub has recently been taking care of that concern for us 😅
My personal feeling, as a user, is that Codeberg’s uptime is acceptable for what the site provides. If you are seriously messed up by your forge maybe being down for an hour or two a week, don’t use Codeberg: self-host!
Fortunately, as a FOSS site, the chance of anything as important as a ‘profit margin’ depending on our uptime is very low :-)
(Also, I will at this point plead size. Our small infra team is frequently overworked to the point that I’m often concerned about the effect on their personal health. Again, please become a member and get involved)
(Furthermore, this thread reflects only my own views and not those of the remainder of the Codeberg presidium, board – nor (most importantly) does it reflect the views of the members of Codeberg as a whole, who ultimately make the decisions.)
Something else I saw is that our messaging on what private repositories can be used for with us is not clear enough.
To take the opportunity to clarify here:
• Private repositories are absolutely allowed, but subject to rules, just like public repositories are subject to rules
• Using a private repository for a software project that you’re not yet ready to release publically is absolutely okay
• Using a private repository for personal software you wrote for your own use only is absolutely okay
Moderatorially speaking, we tend to regard accounts with *only* private repos as a red flag (and such people who have accounts like that are usually rejected as active/voting members if they apply). But they’re allowed as long as their size remains reasonable.
The rules are there because unfortunately, we do see blatant abuse of our resources (like people uploading their whole home directory to a private repo as a personal backup).
I think we should work on making our rules about this clearer!
@dpk I have been looking to move away from github with my projects for a while now, but self-hosting is more effort than I want to put in.
If you don't mind a question - how does codeberg feel about adult content?
I'm a (hobby) game developer. All my games are GPL / CC, but many are also, well, pornographic. While I don't see anything against that in the Terms, I definitely care about social norms. Is that something that would be acceptable on codeberg?
@dpk
CI is definitely a big reason for GH.
Especially (free) builds on/for macOS are something I couldn't setup myself (at reasonable cost).
Another problem is that even third-party CI hosters like CircleCI or CirrusCI or Travis AFAIK don't work with Codeberg (or Forgejo in general). Obviously that's not Codebergs/Forgejos fault, but it's something that so far has kept me at Github :-/
@chrysn @dpk
A completely different thing is: I have thought about hosting a Forgejo instance myself for source ports, open source games and such. Not a private instance, but much smaller scale than Codeberg.
But as I live in Germany I fear that I'll have to pay for cease-and-desist orders (Abmahnung) in case someone feels their rights violated by reverse-engineered reimplementations of their games or whatever...
@chrysn @dpk
I'm just one guy, not a corporation or at least association, I can't afford legal issues like that :-/
(of course a very German problem, in other countries you could probably react to a C&D by taking down the repo in question without having to pay anyone anything. Also not optimal esp. if the claims are dubious, but much smaller risk)
@dpk Oh wow, I did not know you could do this! 👀 When federation does eventually come around, is it planned for forges that are set up like this to "migrate" painlessly?
(Sorry if this is a dumb question. I am not sure how this stuff is set up.)
@dpk yesss
my biggest problem with the present code forge situation is that you have an unfortunately very binary option of "have a totally centralised ecosystem" and "have 30000 different forgejo instances that clog up my password manager"
i have i think 6 code forge accounts. i do not want or need 6 code forge accounts.
federation or even just SSO would be such a boon for this
@dpk From OpenCommit side I'd like to chime in here that we agree. 💪
Our position is that we're aiming to become one(!) of the cornerstones in a #federated world of forges. We want to be there for anyone that doesn't want to or can't run their own #forge.
One of our beliefs is "one is none". One commercial, closed source entity like #Microsoft is bad, just like one #Codeberg or one #OpenCommit.
Hence our view is of a network of forges large and small to support #opensource together.
❤️
@dpk Haven't used #GitHub other than for accessing other source code for months now, and the current event gave me the push to delete both the @interpeer org and my personal profile.
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