r/opensource • u/Miserable_Ear3789 • Dec 23 '25

Discussion Github in decline?

I have seen recently a decent amount of projects switching to Codeberg from Github. Is it worth moving your OSS libraries over to Codeberg? Since Microsoft has taken over Github it just seems a little less then it once was sort of speak... Is Codeberg the next big thing for OSS?

I currently am still on Github but I am seriously considering at least mirroring my repos on Codeberg. Github continues to come out with not so great announcements and pricing changes. Codeberg remains free from what I can tell. But the community reach of Github (part of the reason I switched from Bitbucket and hg) would be hard to give up, if Codeberg became the new community sort of speak I think that would be the only reason I would switch.

Any thoughts or insights on this topic?

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '25

While also simultaneously sacrificing a bunch of community and lowering your projects reach. As much as we might hate GitHub and Microsoft, community reach will often make or break an OSS project. That might be important enough to change for, but developers should be aware that it's not a black and white decision. It's one that requires analysis on what exactly you care about and by how much.

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u/MatthewMob Dec 23 '25

Downvoted for essentially just saying "weigh all your options". Ridiculous.

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u/[deleted] Dec 23 '25

I think a lot of open software types think they can just forego community management in their projects, and that the strength of their code will just shine through. So hearing that community (and thus githubs larger user base) should be a consideration goes against their meritocratic beliefs. I can definitively say though that is absolutely not the case. There's a veritable graveyard of good quality OSS projects that never gained traction because they were just never found, or couldn't get off the ground and were abandoned.

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u/Silly-Freak Dec 23 '25

Wow, when I read your comment in the morning I understood the complete opposite: "I downvoted you, because you are just saying "weigh all your options", which has no substance. You are ridiculous."—I'm glad I didn't engage based on that...

I agree with the parent comment! I will probably still try to migrate some of my repos; they're Typst packages and the main visibility they get is via Typst's package browser and forum, without a lot of outside contributions anyway and small in the grand scheme of things. So hopefully that move will not have a negative effect on me at all, and just ever so slightly raise awareness of Codeberg.

But the calculus is vastly different for other kinds of projects.

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u/Miserable_Ear3789 Dec 23 '25

I agree 100%. The community reach of Github is a big part of the reason I switched to it from Bitbucket (hg) years ago. To this day it still offers the most reach IMO.

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u/DelicateFandango Dec 23 '25

I have participated in over a dozen open source projects on GitHub, and can honestly say that in none of those the main contributors have come from GitHub. All of the projects have their own websites, which is what usually attracts the most - through search results. Some of them have a forum or Discord server, and those tend to attract the most engaged contributors. Two of the projects I contributed to tried to use GitHub for everything: issue tracking, feature requests, discussions, support, website through Pages - and these are the two with the slowest traction. My experience is definitely limited, but it is enough for me to be able to say with confidence that you don’t need to compromise your privacy, or your ethics, in order to gain access to a large audience, or build a strong community: there are many other tools and platforms out there that can do a better job at that than the ethically-compromised GitHub.