Well, kind of. I guess I’m leaving GitHub like I left Facebook: I don’t plan on using it anymore, but since that’s where the people of our residence tell us about their kids’ lemonade stands, I’m keeping my account to interact with the outside world when needed.

GitHub will always have a special place in my heart, it hurts to do the maths but I think I started using it in… 2008? I’ve been using (and supporting!) them ever since: I used the now defunct Job API as an example in my book, I contributed to libraries using their API, beta tested products like the iOS app or GitHub Actions, and I even tried to provide helpful feedback on Copilot, despite the fact that… well, you know.

That being said, this has been a long time coming for various reason, but these days it feels like your ethics is the only thing you can control, so I’m chosing to follow mine and leave. Last week, with the TV in the background, I gradually started removing stuff from there and it wasn’t as painful or annoying as I thought it would be.

First, I used gh (a tool I really like) to list all the forks I owned. The first half were a bunch libraries from my buddybuild days that I used to fork and try to onboard, while the other half were mostly Apple repositories that I forked once I was (finally!) allowed to do some open-source work. There was nothing really interesting nor surprising, but I’m pretty sure I’d done a pass on recent forks already.

The next thing I did was just going through all the repos I created. I went through a lot of various emotions: confusion for the empty repositories with a cryptic codename I could no longer explain, frustration for private side projects I worked on but couldn’t publicly release because of Apple’s open-source policy, and nostalgia for projects I’d simply abandoned. From there, I made decisions:

• the stuff I cared about but that provided little value, I simply downloaded an archive, deleted the repository, and added to my will¹
• the aforementioned stuff with cryptic names and often very little code, I simply removed
• the rest I pushed to my fresh Codeberg account, marked as archived on Codeberg and deleted on GitHub. It’s usually stuff that I mentioned in blog posts or side project I’m actually working on.

Codeberg has been fun to use so far, it feels like GitHub in the early days with a snappy UI and no constant mentions of an AI offering I simply don’t care about. I like the fact that it’s backed by a non profit based in Europe² and that it’s based on an open-source tool, Forgejo. I briefly considered self hosting my own instance for fun, but I know it would only be fun for a short while. I reserve the right to reconsider after I’m done packing food rations and building my nuclear bunker. In the meantime, I put my money where my mouth is: I downgraded my GitHub account (that I was paying for extra CI minutes) to free and gave that money to Codeberg.

I still have a few private projects to migrate, such as Comics Outmash and this blog (which uses Netlify). It’s only been delayed because I still need to figure out the CI situation. This is the kind of stuff I might consider self-hosting because access to Codeberg’s CI instance needs to be reviewed first, which I totally understand.

I don’t expect my decision to impact GitHub, but at this point it feels worse to put my ethics aside and embrace the enshittification, so I’m taking the leap. I guess we’ll see in 6 months if and how my life was transformed by this change?