Federate Away From GitHub

18 Nov 2025

The past few weeks have seen major AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare outages. I predict Google Cloud will have a major outage sometime soon as well. Each time one of these massive systems goes down, it takes a sizable chunk of the internet with it. This is troubling: the internet should be more robust against partial outages.

A professor at the University of Utah put together an interesting site called Are We Decentralized Yet? which measures the concentration of users on the Fediverse and Bluesky. The Fediverse has tons of instances, none of which has an overwhelming majority of the users. Bluesky, on the other hand, has most of its users concentrated on the main Bluesky instance. This indicates that the Fediverse is substantially more resilient against outages or takeover.

Another more troubling statistic from this site is the concentration of Git forges: GitHub hosts over 90% of public Git repositories! Git was built to make distributed software development easy, and yet so much of our software development happens on a centralized platform. Whenever GitHub goes down (which seems to happen more these days; maybe it has something to do with their attempted transition to Azure) so many people get blocked. Centralization makes for brittle systems.

Censorship is another issue with concentrated platforms. GitHub has taken down the repositories of tools like youtube-dl and other tools just because they got hit with a DMCA notice. I will not go into the legal details of the DMCA—and I am sure some of the takedown requests come in good-faith from people with legitimate interests in protecting the works of artists and authors. But there are enough cases where a tool was targeted (e.g. youtube-tl) just because some litigious entity didn’t like what the software was doing. The more we federate our tools, the more resilient we are against government or corporate censorship and control.

An issue I take with GitHub specifically is how it has used open-source software to train LLMs without the authors’ consent. The jury is still out on whether or not that constitutes fair-use, but it does seem unfair to me that this was done without (in my opinion) sufficient notice or option to opt-out of the training. There are a lot of issues surrounding using e.g. code released under the GPL for training, which then an LLM can spit out into a proprietary codebase without the license being respected.

I have been working to move some of my repositories over to the Forgejo instance Codeberg. I still keep plenty of things on GitHub (like this blog, though I wouldn’t mind changing that someday soon) but almost all my new FOSS projects live on Codeberg.

Forgejo is working on adding federation for issues and pull requests; what this means is that you wouldn’t have to have an account on every Forgejo instance where you wanted to open an issue or submit a PR. Instead, you could use one account on a smaller (or even self-hosted!) instance of Forgejo to perform these actions. The work has been underway for some time—I don’t know when it will be done, but I sure hope they can find a good way to get it working!

I am not saying that GitHub is evil or that you should stop using it. I will continue to keep an active GitHub account for the foreseeable future. It is a tremendously valuable service. What I do think is that companies and individuals should migrate personal and private projects to other platforms, self-hosted or otherwise. Communities built around open-source software (especially those inclined to use the GPL or the like) should consider using a FOSS-friendly forge like Codeberg whose values are more aligned.

I will be putting more and more of my work into Codeberg or (someday, hopefully) a self-hosted forge that can federate with others. I hope you join me. We can make a more robust, open, and free future for software by breaking up the deep concentration of Git forges.