NOTE: This post is written from a private developer perspective, not that of my employer.
I’ve started migrating my active projects from GitHub to Codeberg. Codeberg is a European open-source alternative that overall resembles GitHub—a code collaboration platform. I’d been considering it for a while, and now that it’s almost done, I wanted to share my thoughts.j
Why? One thing I’ve increasingly felt about GitHub is that they ignore basic, important developer features while prioritizing other unrequested ones. What I miss includes fast-forward merges for linear history, rebase-only repos, SHA256 support, and AsciiDoc rendering that’s still missing or broken. The whole markup rendering is a mess with uneven support for different formats. Full token security has been requested for a long time, yet we still have to use old, insecure Classic tokens for publishing packages (fine-grained tokens aren’t done). Many solutions end up 80% done and then seem to stall. Maybe it’s telling that the open source parts, like the GitHub markup repo, seem abandoned. There are issues sitting for years, and the commit history shows no steady stewardship. Overall it feels like GitHub has, in some areas, stopped prioritizing developer community needs and technical excellence. Much of GitHub is historically good too, of course, but I expect far more technical drive and listening to the developer community from such a widely used global service.