I love GitHub, but it's changing.
Somewhere along the road GitHub stopped feeling like a developer tool and started feeling like a Microsoft product. The Copilot push left a sour taste in my mouth. The stalled feature requests. Years-old issues sitting untouched while competitors ship. Newer git providers like Codeberg, Forgejo and Gitea aren't having these problems. They are building what GitHub stopped bothering to. They're faster, they care about privacy in ways Microsoft doesn't, and they're run by people who actually use them. Nobody's saying GitHub is going away, but for the first time in mainstream dev culture it feels like serious developers are starting to ask 'how do I offramp?'.
GitHub has years of your work. Do you know what's there?
Depending on when you made your account, you might have a decade of work sitting on Github. Some of it's public. Some of it should definitely not be. A few private repos probably have collaborators you added years ago and completely forgot about. GitHub became the default so gradually that most developers never bothered to take stock of what accumulated. And now the platform holds something closer to a fingerprint of your professional life than a storage bucket. Leaving means losing your star history, your fork graph, your contributor graph, that is the social proof that took years to build. So before you rage-migrate to a self-hosted Gitea instance at 2am because you read one too many HN threads, do this first.
Step 1: Audit what you actually have
Go to your profile. Not the pinned repos…. all of them. Scroll to the bottom. Most developers with a few years of experience have somewhere between 30 and 60 repos and haven't thought about half of them since they were created. A third are genuinely active. The rest are tutorials they cloned once, side projects that got three commits, forks they made to submit a PR and never cleaned up. If you're thinking about migrating, you also don't want to drag all of that with you. Moving 50 repos to a new host is only worth it for the handful that actually matter.
Step 2: Clean house before you decide
Once you can see everything, the decision gets a lot clearer. The repos worth moving are probably 5–10% of what's there. Archive what you want to keep with RepoSweeper. Delete the genuine junk. Make private anything that was accidentally public. Remove collaborators you don't recognize anymore.
This is something worth doing every year regardless of where you host. Your GitHub profile is still the first place a hiring manager or potential collaborator looks. Eight active, well-documented projects reads completely differently than a graveyard of 60 repos where the most recent commit was two years ago.
Step 3: Then decide where you actually want to go
A few options worth taking seriously:
Codeberg - Non-profit, EU-based, runs Forgejo. The privacy story is about as clean as you'll find anywhere. Good for open source work where signaling values matters to you. The community is smaller, so discoverability takes a hit.
Forgejo - The open source fork of Gitea, maintained by the community after the governance dispute. Self-hostable or use a provider. Full control, no drama.
GitLab - The most GitHub-like experience. Better CI/CD story, strong privacy options, self-hostable. Still a company with its own incentives, but a different risk profile than Microsoft.
Self-hosted Gitea - Maximum control, maximum maintenance burden. Worth it if you already have the infrastructure. Probably not worth it if you're a solo developer who just wants to ship things without becoming a sysadmin.
Honestly, the hedged approach makes sense for most people: keep a GitHub presence for discoverability - it's still where open source contributors and hiring managers look - and run your active private work wherever you actually trust.
The one habit that makes this sustainable
The real problem isn't which provider you use; it's that most developers have no visibility into their own activity across repos. You push code, context-switch, push more code. It's too easy to lose track of what you've shipped. RepoRecap sends you a weekly AI summary of your own commits: what you built, what themes emerged, what you actually accomplished. It works off your GitHub activity today and will work wherever you end up. It's the easiest way to track your productivity across all of your repositories. If you're anxious about GitHub's direction, that's a reasonable feeling. Your first move should be knowing what you have, cleaning it up, and building habits that make you less dependent on any single platform.
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RepoSweeper is free - see everything you have on GitHub in one view. RepoRecap sends you a weekly digest of your own activity. Both are at reposweeper.com.
