Who’s leaving GitHub and why

We've long thought of GitHub as the default place to host open source projects. It's never been the only option, just the most popular and for that reason the easiest. But now a number of high profile projects have walked away from GitHub and they're pretty vocal about why.

But what are the options for people who want to leave GitHub and how hard is it to make that move?

Let's talk a bit about some of the projects that have left first, one of the bigger projects leaving GitHub is the ZEG programming language, which has come to prominence because it's an intended replacement for C and supposed to be less complicated than the likes of Rust.

Its developers have been determined to leave GitHub ever since Microsoft bought GitHub some years back, but the state of GitHub's infrastructure as of late has become the real killer.

To quote, stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken. Most importantly, Actions has inexcusable bugs while being completely neglected, so Zig has since moved to competing service Codeberg. That's one of the alternatives mentioned a great deal among those who are exiting GitHub's empire.

Another big name that's quitting GitHub is Mitchell Hashimoto. This is the creator of Vagrant and Ghost TTY.

He's a decades long veteran user of GitHub and back in April he posted that one of his key projects, Ghost Tty, is leaving and one of his reasons echoes a lot of other people's.

GitHub is just not reliable anymore and I quote it's not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there, but it doesn't want me to be there.

I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

So far Ghost TTY's GitHub repo is still being updated as of July of 2026, but Hashimoto did say the migration process will take time, so it's only a matter of time before they exit and set up camp somewhere else.

So as you can see, the grievances that people have aren't just ideological. They're not just about protesting Microsoft or closed source software or what have you. These are practical complaints. Most of them revolve around GitHub Actions, which has been notoriously unreliable for some time now.

Now, for those who want to leave GitHub behind, there are two basic choices. One, you go to a competing service like GitLab or Codeberg, which we mentioned earlier.

Codeberg is built using ForgeJoe, itself, a fork of an open source project called Gitea. And Codeberg is also run as a nonprofit, so theoretically it has greater transparency and accountability than GitHub, again owned by Microsoft.

GitLab, the other big competing service, also has some of its bits available as open source components which you can host. But the enterprise level offering is proprietary and that's what powers the service that is used on the public Internet.

The other big option for leaving GitHub, as I hinted, is you can self host. You can set up your own server that runs the open source bits used by services like Codeberg.

In that case you'd be using a project like Gitea, or maybe the open source edition of GitLab. But self hosting is the most complex and difficult option because now you're responsible for everything.

The hosting, the technical support, keeping the infrastructure updated, making backups, user management, you name it. On the plus side, it's entirely yours. And if it's only you and a few other people, it might make sense as a choice.

Now the other big question if you want to move away from GitHub, whether to self host or just go to a competitor, how hard is it to do that?

What's the lift and shift like in Theoretically migrating a repository should be easy as cloning it, because Git is open source and all these services are based on git, so what's the big deal?

The problem is a big part of GitHub's draw has been proprietary features like its CI CD integration system. Now typically competing services offered some way to automate the migration.

Codeberg for instance, they have a built in migration tool that can migrate directly from GitHub. The big hurdle again is if you have GitHub specific features like GitHub Actions. Now there is support for migrating these things to matching features on Codeberg, but it's still considered experimental.

And if you want to replicate GitHub actions locally with something like GitHub, and if you want to replicate GitHub actions locally with something Like GitLab, you can migrate those actions with a little work.

Now, just because you leave GitHub behind for the sake of hosting a project, that doesn't mean you have to abandon GitHub entirely.

There are some projects that move off GitHub but still use GitHub as a passive mirror for the project, either as a backup service or as a way to give other GitHub users casual access to the project.

But they won't accept pull requests or anything like that through GitHub. So the idea is just not to have GitHub itself as the chief dependency for where everything is hosted. Now one other question.

How big a dent is an exodus like this making in GitHub's overall popularity with developers?

From what I can tell, we're not talking about a statistically significant percentage of projects that are decamping, but a few high profile projects like the ones I mentioned, those that have a fair amount of mind share with developers or who have a list developers attached to them.

If a few of those decamp, they can generate momentum. So, so what do I think is going to happen? A mass Exodus away from GitHub? That seems unlikely, honestly.

What I do see is more projects feeling a greater sense of freedom to choose where they're hosted and how they're hosted, especially if they're smaller projects with more intimate teams and don't feel as much urgency to conform to the needs of an existing larger team or company.

And that to me is the main issue. GitHub is a center of gravity. Things like that don't shift except by degrees, if they shift at all.

And they can shift very heavily for some parts of the dev world, like the smaller pockets of people working on projects like the ones I mentioned. But for others they may only shift a little bit or not at all.

We could see a circumstance where we have developers here and there who are high profile and in charge of certain projects decamping and taking quite a few people with them.

But the vast majority of the rest of the field would remain untouched. Everybody would still be on GitHub. Now there is something, an irony in all of this when I think about it, because GitHub's underpinning, which is Git, was created to replace a proprietary tool called Bitkeeper.

Git itself is still open source, but it's GitHub, this commercial proprietary product built on top of it that's become everybody's platform.

But unless Microsoft ups GitHub stability and makes other changes that seem to be very badly needed, even people who don't mind using a Microsoft owned product are going to look elsewhere. And right now it seems like they already are. So that's it for this episode.

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