From GitHub to Codeberg/Forgejo ★

What’s the problem with GitHub?

One part of my GitHub aversion is me being anti the big American tech corporations for ideological reasons. I’d like to reduce my usage and dependence of Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon etc where I can and moving away from GitHub fits that goal nicely.

The other reason is GitHub’s enshittification. GitHub has been slow and slightly buggy for years and it’s not getting better. They push out badly planned features while shipping this kind of code in GitHub actions runner:

#!/bin/bash

SECONDS=0
while [[ $SECONDS != $1 ]]; do
    :
done

(This apparently broke Zig and caused them to leave for Codeberg.)

You may not like it but this is what peak vibe coding looks like

I know it’s a snarky comment, but with a CEO that says “embrace AI or get out” then it’s hard to resist.

There’s empirical data to back up GitHub’s unreliability; just check out these uptime logs (taken 2026-04-27 from third party sites since the official status page predictably lies):

They don’t call it “Microslop” for nothing.

Self-hosted + managed

Codeberg is based on Forgejo, which is great to self-host. I’ve had it running a few weeks when I’ve been playing with my homelab and it feels exceptionally fast. The web UI is super responsive and I frequently have to double-check that I pushed as it finished so quickly.

I would love to have the speed and privacy for all my repositories but I’ve got some that I want to be public (the source for this site for example). I considered a few different setups:

1. Sync back changes to GitHub via Forgejo’s built-in GitHub sync?

   (Keeping GitHub active would defeat the point a little though.)

2. Sync changes from my Forgejo instance to Codeberg?

   (Maybe annoying to manage multiple repos?)

3. Only use Codeberg?

   (I’d lose speed and privacy for my private repos.)

4. Expose my Forgejo instance running in my homelab?

   (The internet is a scary place.)

5. Setup a public Forgejo on my Hetzner VPS?

   (I’d still have to protect it and manage traffic.)

In the end I decided to use Codeberg as for my public-facing repositories and Forgejo as my main interface (for both public and private repos).

Some of my public repos are close to read-only (this site’s source for instance) so I’ve setup a mirror where Forgejo will push changes to Codeberg automatically. However, it’s weird to also pull changes from Codeberg to Forgejo. I guess I could setup a script to do it, but pull requests from others are rare enough that I can do it manually. Other repos (such as tree-sitter-djot) are left alone as they’re more collaborative in nature and I can’t be bothered to keep two sources in sync.

Is it good?

Yes, both Codeberg and Forgejo are very good. They are snappy and speedy and there are no features I miss from either GitHub or GitLab (and plenty I’m glad to avoid—getting AI shoved into every crevice for instance).
(Yes, I used an em-dash on purpose.)

At the moment Codeberg is admittedly having periods with pretty bad performance issues. This is because they’ve been under a DDOS attack for quite some time, which has been frustrating.

The migration

The migration wasn’t difficult, just a bit repetitive.

For private repositories I just deleted them from GitHub and pushed them to Forgejo.

Public repositories had a few more steps:

1. Push them to Forgejo

2. Push them to Codeberg

3. Add a header redirecting to Codeberg similar to this:

4. Archive them on GitHub