GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

Codeberg, a Git code hosting platform, recently took a decision to prohibit projects that mostly consist of generative-AI-written code which has prompted concern and extensive discussion elsewhere.

The decision does not surprise me, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. Codeberg has always presented itself as a mission-driven alternative to GitHub, not neutral infrastructure.1

What interests me is the disappointment in the response. Many people reacted as though one of the few plausible GitHub replacements had ruled them or their projects out. They wanted Codeberg to be a universal alternative, a better GitHub and the obvious place to go when leaving it.

To me, that exposes a big gap in the open-source space. There are plenty of places to host a Git repository, but remarkably few places to host an open-source community. GitHub gives projects a shared pool of identities, habits and paths to discovery. None of the alternatives has reproduced that at a similar scale.

I don’t think the answer has to be another centralized platform, or that every project should live in one place. But decentralization is not enough on its own. Whatever replaces GitHub still needs a shared social layer: identities contributors already have, conventions they understand and ways to discover projects across the network.

Why not self-hosting?

Whenever dissatisfaction with GitHub comes up, someone inevitably says: “Git is decentralized. Just self-host a forge.”

I’ve self-hosted Gitea for years, so this is an argument I’m very familiar with. Self-hosting works well for personal projects, but I wouldn’t use it for something I wanted strangers to contribute to. On GitHub, most people already have an account and understand how issues and pull requests work. On my forge, even reporting a small bug means creating another account, learning how my forge works and what conventions I want you to follow. Unless someone really cared, they probably wouldn’t bother. I know I wouldn’t.

And contribution is…