Ever since the day I made my decision to say goodbye to GitHub, many people who know me asked about why switched away.

Why did I switch?

Back in 2022, I was talking to LTS20050703, a friend I made back in the days I was still spending time on Discord bots and discord.py, about GitHub and stuff. He switched to Codeberg in July and I didn't know about it until late August that year. In his GitHub profile now contains a message from the Software Freedom Conservancy about their Give Up Github campaign. I can't remember my thoughts back then, but I do remember that in the very next week, I completely switched to Codeberg and announced it on my GitHub profile. (Fun fact: My Codeberg account is actually older than his)

So, why? If you ask me now, I would say that it was for fun. I just blindly followed my friend without second thoughts, and that's that. It was fairly easy to make the change, since at that time, I didn't have any well-known or major projects hosted on my GitHub account.

So, why would you switch?

Whenever people asked me about the beneficials of switching to a forge alternative, I always say that it is up to your preferences and ideologies. To be honest, forge alternatives don't really have much to offer instead of being a free and decentralized alternative to GitHub.

GitHub has an extremely large (and perhaps the largest) programming community on the Internet, so if you decided to host your projects there, it would be easier for your repos to gain popularity, get contributions, and perhaps funding. And since GitHub is a Microsoft's product, it can offer to offer its users a large set of features, like CI/CD, page hosting, etc.

Alternative forge instances doesn't have that much users to begin with, so it wouldn't be wrong to say that stars will be harder to get. And most instances were either self-hosted or supported by a non-profit organization, so they couldn't offer you the same set of features like GitHub.

I would argue that small communities are often high-quality ones, and it's somewhat easier to gain respect in such communities, since a decent amount of users were active developers who were unhappy with their previous Git forges and thoughtful + determined enough to make the change. And, actually, Codeberg does offer a free page hosting service (though I personally don't like it due to being very unstable), and a CI service (have to request for it). You can see my request for CI access here as an example.

If you want a comparison that is focused on fundamental differences between Git forges, Forgejo wrote a nice page covering that for you.

To end it all, it's up to you and your opinion. If you think you can trust Microsoft or can't accept to switch away from where you had been staying for so long, or just didn't see how alternative Git forges would benefit you, I would say it is better for you should stay and probably not think about it any longer. But if you are willing to be more open and/or wanted to try new things, I recommend creating an account on Codeberg as a starting point and experiment with stuff there.