Since Microsoft owns Github, Gitlab is Corp owned now since 2022, why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
Genuine questions. I’m assumming either familiarity & simplicity with GH or difficulty migrating elsewhere?
PoV: I’m a dev and I want to put my code out there. GH is basically a social network that aims to show my project to like-minded folk, no other service does that. Personally I enjoy this social aspect and occasionally check on GH feed to see what the circle around me is doing, to catch sw trends.
Why would I be concerned about privacy when the idea is to make it public? GH is just a free host that happens to be most popular and it would reach most eyes, the best chance of getting back some contributions.
If I used any other git hosting service - my code would be scrapped just the same, but would reach almost no human. If I tried to publicise the project myself, the other devs and potential new users will be far more likely to click on a GH link than any alternative. Self hosted solution would get least clicks. People like familiar URLs that lead them to “safe” sites.
Among big tech, I actually prefer Microsoft over Google, Meta and others. Yes, MS is just as disgusting, but at least they are grossly incompetent and only manage to execute a fraction of evil schemes they come up with. It’s funny to watch actually.
For what it’s worth, Codeberg/Forgejo is working on adding federation features that will (eventually) connect different instances together to rebuild the “social network” part of things without centralizing on a single individual instance, much like the Fediverse is working on doing for other social networks.
Federation doesn’t fix the problem, at least not in its entirety. I posted a longer comment in another thread but the long and short of it is that accounts need to be portable if it’s going to work for a git hosting solution.
The comment: https://lemmy.zip/comment/26430897
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Very nice! This makes total sense. Let me rebuttal with Enshittification
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
Microsoft is good at fucking up platforms they acquire! Lately they’ve just been more patient with it.
What do you mean rebuttal? Both are true.
It is almost trivial to move git code from one hoster to another. If GitHub becomes so bad, you just move.
It’s trivial if your project is trivial. Once you’ve got development/CI/CD workflows, releases, issue management, community interaction, maybe even project management or Github pages (may god have mercy on your soul), it gets a lot less trivial.
Git itself is a distributed version control system, moving it around is indeed trivial. It’s everything else that Github provides that is far less trivial, and they’ve worked hard on building the vendor lock-in elements for those things lately.
True, but there are also exporter scripts for that stuff. Many projects have also mirroring already set up.
That’s not a rebuttal. If it was, then Facebook would be dead. Twitter would be dead. Reddit would be dead. Windows would be dead.
For Codeberg, they don’t allow commercial projects. You of course have Forgejo (which is what Codeberg utilises), and many open-source developers have been moving to it. I’ve also heard some projects switching over to GitLab as well, which is corporate-owned, but I believe has a self-hosted option that gives people a little more control. But for many people, GitHub works fine as it is and don’t want the hassle of transferring their projects, commit history, issues, etc. over.
Why aren’t more people using Codeberg
From my biased perspective here on the Fediverse, basically everybody who isn’t profoundly behind the curve is already on Codeberg.
why are so many who preach privacy or using Linux, etc, still using a MS product?
As someone else already mentioned, familarity. You published a repo of your foss project so other people can contribute to it and the more the merrier. Most people happen to be on github.
I think Microsoft learned their lesson finally on fucking up acquisitions (talking Mixer especially lol) where they buy out a platform but then curse it with their touch and it fails. Now, with LinkedIn and Github, they sort of leave it be with subtle and incremental changes because then petiole continue to adopt it. Now its like FB or Snapchat where people are there bc they think everyone else is there (assuming). Idk, it sucks.
I’d say familiarity is it.
It sure isnt the uptime!
Inertia is a hell of a fundamental property of the universe.
I am moving to codeberg / forgejo… slowly… I’m gonna migrate everything one day I swear.
it’s also because they don’t believe the same confused fundamentalist nonsense OP does
It’s not just familiarity, it’s lack of awareness of the history of how we got to here.
Part of what made OSS into what it is was the last 30 years of advocacy. A lot of those advocates are now middle-aged and thinking more about retirement than about the next wave of OSS that needs to supplant the Big Tech that OSS built.
Back in 2001, OSS development centered around mailing lists. https://marc.info/ is a graveyard of OSS mailing lists that largely died off somewhere between 2010-2015. Just as most of the earlier wave of OSS folks were having kids and settling into their middle-tier jobs with the Big Tech firms they helped build.
Gen A / Gen Z needs to step into the advocacy shoes that the Gen X / Millenial OSS advocates filled 20-some years ago. Figure out where next-gen OSS will be built and get to it.
Hell yeah! Great perspective.
That’s why a federated git repo network of could be pretty cool.
Forgejo (the basis for Codeberg) is working on ActivityPub federation
If you’re talking about companies, safety, SLA/SLO agreements, security, lack of admin overhead…lots of reasons.
Lots of companies and projects are leaving GitHub because of the Copilot being shoved down everyone’s throats though.
One thing that keeps me from using codeberg more is that private repos are limited to 100MB. So I still need to use GitHub to keep some of my personal projects that contain purchased assets that can’t be made public. I do still have a codeberg account and mirror what I can, but it means I can’t stop using GitHub for now.
For private repos you could always host your own Forgejo. That way they’re actually private, too, not that Codeberg is untrustworthy, but not needing to trust anyone is even better.
Github has been otherwise fairly alright under Microsoft until recently.
I feel like it’s been going downhill since 2019, given the point in time Microsoft acquired them was in 2018 I’d say people have just not wanted to acknowledge the trajectory. (That included me.)
Every big feature since 2019 has been enterprise slop, in my opinion:
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In 2019 they announced dependabot. What’s wrong with it?
It’s not configurable, rather than allowing a universal mechanism so people can feed dependencies into it via some custom tool that e.g. generates a standardized listing, it only supports the popular package managers. This is exactly what big enterprise wants since they only care about their super old codebases and what those use, not any upcoming stack.
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In 2019, they also announced security advisories. What’s wrong with it?
That Github to this day in 2026, hasn’t bothered to add the most basic feature that regular FOSS projects would need to handle security reports, which is confidential issues. Instead, the assumption seems to be you’re either a big enterprise that already has some dedicated security team with their own email infrastructure, or Microsoft doesn’t care about you.
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In 2020, they announced Github’s Codespaces. What’s wrong with it?
It makes the UI more complicated and as far as I know leaves buttons for it everywhere that can’t be turned off even if you don’t want it. And it’s a vendor lock-in feature that’s expensive, the average small FOSS project will neither have the budget to use it nor likely care to do so.
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Then of course the entire AI slop spin since 2025 ish.
There’s probably more, but those are the big ones that I’ve noticed that made me suspicious of where this was going.
You’re not wrong.
But … it’s also been convenient and largely free for most use cases and has had a better feature set then most alternates without having to host your own.
If you could host your own Gitlab was the choice.
The reliability issues of late is what is making most people actually contemplate moving.
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You’re the first I’ve ever heard say this. (Or read in this case)
I’ve just been freeing up my phone and life from all major data siphons. Social media has been gone for years, but then news about LinkedIn getting way worse with data (which it’s already sucked) and sharing now with Amazon, is just BS so I’ve closed it.
One REALLY annoying thing I’ve personally noticed and can’t confirm but feel it; all the companies with jobs postings basically collect all these applicants data without ever hiring. It’s another dataset that can be monetized, so now companies can make money off everyone without much effort. Through some efforts I’ve read online as all as gone through myself, we all know there job market sucks-especially tech, but I guess I never considered why there are so so many posted jobs still until now.
Fuck them all!!
Stupidity and momentum.
My customer decided to host their shit there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There isn’t feature parity for many projects’ requirements. Also, support isn’t quite there on the same level. It’ll take time.
Same reason people still use Facebook and Xitter.
