Last February I came across Srijans blogpost, asking if you can give up GitHub. This led me down a rabbit hole, reading blog post after blog post of people divesting from GitHub and going self-hosted.

After all the reading and research, I came to the conclusion that the time has come to give up GitHub, or not quite yet.. I still gotta use it for work, as well as for organizations like friByte, and there’s still a lot of open source projects hosted there.

But, for my own projects, I’ll choose to host them myself. So yes, I am keeping my account even though all the repositories will link to my own forge.

Here’s a quick bulletlist of some of the reasons why I’m doing this:

• I want to avoid centralization on services I don’t control.
• Copilot is a for-profit product trained on many projects under copyleft licenses..
• GitHub was heavly critized for providing services to the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) back in 2020.
• I don’t want my code plagiarized by Copilot (Even though the code probably sucks).
• Microsoft.

Okay, so now what? Well.. Selfhosting, baby! (lol)

Being inspired by Nils, I went with Forgejo as my self-hosted software forge. And after maybe a week or two of setting it up and getting everything running, I present code.kjelsrud.dev! It may not be perfectly set up, but it’s mine and I’m proud. I even set up a mirror to Codeberg for my repositories, as a “backup”-solution.

If you want to read more about the topic, I recommend checking out the Software Freedom Conservancys page - “Give Up GitHub!”, as well as Drew DeVaults (the founder of SourceHut) blogpost - “GitHub Copilot and open source laundering”. Or, you could click one of the many other links in this post.