Divesting from Github and going self-hosted

So long, and thanks for all the fish. 🐬

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally finished moving all my projects from Github to a self-hosted Forgejo instance (how I landed on Forgejo).

Here it is in all it’s glory: code.on.nilsnh.no. ❤️

As for my Github projects, I’ve deleted their git histories and put up a notice explaning where the code has moved because cool URIs don’t change. Hat tip to the blog post Ditching Github, which inspired me to not delete my projects outright, but to scrub their history instead.

I was also inspired by the Give Up Github! campaign launched by the Software Freedom Conservancy. Besides, critizing Copilot they also argue that Github is actively working against copyleft software, and they point out that Github is also heavily critized for providing services to the USA Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

For now I’m keeping my Github account, so that I can still contribute to projects on Github if need be. On a related note, I’m excited about Sourcehut’s foray into innovating on the old ways of email-based code collaboration, where users can send code patches without an account. I’m also excitedly following the Forgefed project, which aims to enable code collaboration between decentralized git servers.

But what about all the free contributions you’ll be missing by leaving Github? Well, there wasn’t that much to begin with. The stuff I’ve written so far has been pretty niche, and has received only the odd star now and then, which suits me fine. Much of what I’ve built has been to solve my own problems, and in the cases where it helped others it was a neat bonus.

Me divesting from Github won’t come as a surprise to any readers of my blog. I’ve been bemoaning the centralization of services for a while now. At NDC Oslo 2020 I gave a talk called “Real Rebels Pay Their Taxes” where I used economical and philosophical theory to argue, that it’s not ethical to keep investing our time and money into large multinational companies which go out of their way to pay next to nothing in taxes.

Over these last four years I’ve witnessed Github’s centralizing effects, and it’s arguably starting to look a little like enshittification. They’re slowly boiling starry-eyed developers by making Copilot launder GPL-licensed code into “clean” code, ready to be pasted into some proprietary SaaS service of tomorrow. Github has almost become a black hole of industry attention, where its azure colored gravitational waves enrapture businesses, that are feverishly pining to be seen as hip and innovative by developers and investors alike.

Github’s launch of Copilot was the final straw for me, that broke the proverbial camel’s back. On one hand Github claims to be a open source champion, but on the other hand it fashioned Copilot to disregard programmers’ copyrights and licenses. The money Github gives to open source is pocket lint compared to the obsene amounts of money tax-optimized away by Github’s owner Microsoft.

Yes, the friction is real and leaving is hard, which is why it’s taken me so long to start divesting from Github. It would have been much quicker to move everything to Codeberg or Sourcehut, but I wanted to see how hard it would be to free myself of third-party services as much as possible.

• For anyone wanting to try self-hosting, I’ve written a comprehensive guide on how I self-host git projects.
• For everyone else, I recommend checking out Codeberg or Sourcehut.

Addendum on AI: I must note that AI sure seems kinda useful. But I want to invest my time and attention in AI that’s both FOSS and built upon ethically sourced data. As far as I know, few or none of the the big AI players are transparent about how they get their data. EU’s new AI Act will require AI vendors to be transparent about their usage of copyrighted data. It’ll be interesting to see when the AI hype train hits EU’s bureaucracy.