Proud GitLab self-hoster here (for private projects). I'd love for someone to beat GitHub. The hard part is going to be replacing the discoverability and the network effect. I find GitLab to be a superior product, technically, but it doesn't matter much in the face of GitHub's momentum as the incumbent 800 lb gorilla.

git ≠ github

git is fine
you can even self-host a git server, no problem

Is this really an unpopular opinion? I feel like with the ever-spreading enshittification, which spreads to GitHub as well, distancing from big tech products is becoming the new normal.

There should be like a federated gitlab for this to be a feasible replacement imo.

Codeberg gang.

I agree, I am not sure if I am ready to make the move myself, but I have ADHD and this post may be just the motivation I need. I am using GitHub as glorified private git server, so the move shouldn't be too difficult. Any recommendations are welcome (thinking of codeberg at the moment)!

Aside from price, I have aspirations of open sourcing stuff this year so some issue tracking and CI/CD features would be appreciated (thought not necessary).

Edit: It seems codeberg is non-commercial, but there is a host for forgejo that seems interesting (https://gna.org/).

(I started a rant about self hosting, then realized it's completely irrelevant but I had already written it, so continue at your own risk)

IMO self hosting is not an option unless you are a sysadmin or somehow have a tonne of relevant experience.

I used to self-host GitLab, one weekend after about a month of being off my hobby projects I tried to login and the service wasn't available. At first, I panicked, I didn't know when my last backup was, but it was a while. In the end, my host was performing scheduled maintenance and a few hours after GitLab was running again, but that incident was enough to scare me away from ever self-hosting anything valuable ever again.

I'll be honest, in not sure I follow the security or privacy arguments.

I do get saying you don't want to give fodder or leverage to a company that at best is neutral to the interests of the average developer, has a terrible track record and already has far to much sway.

[...] very large amount of people still use git.

🤔

I love my GitHub Actions, though. And since I'm already using Azure... In for a penny, in for a pound.

it goes against every fiber of ethics of foss dev's.

Firefox is developed by a nonprofit backed by two corporations (Mozilla Corporation, and MZLA Technologies Corporation), and yet most people seem to support the browser as being ethical. So I wouldn't say corporations are inherently the problem.

it doesn't make sense because foss is there for privacy, security reasons and why would you host it all on one of the biggest and greediest corp of all time?

Who says it's exclusively there for privacy and security? I personally use FOSS because it provides me with an alternative that's affordable (like Libreoffice), or is something that I perceive as being superior to everything else on the market (Home Assistant, Nextcloud, and Mastodon personally are a few).

Privacy and security are still important to me, but I mainly consider my threat model to be different compared to others, so I have a little more trust in companies like Microsoft around certain places. GitHub is also used by some large businesses for hosting their proprietary codebases, so I would say that there is some expectation of security. Granted, we have to take their word for it. But when intellectual property is on the line, I strongly doubt that they're bluffing.

Not everyone, like you, feels comfortable using GitHub though, which is fine. That's why other systems like GitLab and Gitea were built. The core of FOSS, in my opinion, has always been around choice, collaboration, and just sheer will. Linux initially began as a project to get a system running on a single machine. And look where it is now.

And also, contrary to popular belief, free software isn't always inherently secure. It just tends to have vulnerabilities disclosed and patched faster than commercial software only changeable by a small handful.

If you are building foss may as well take a little more effort and put it anywhere else maybe it'll be cheaper too but definetly better in privacy,

There really isn't much of a difference in cost between some of the other major collaborative versions controls, given they all usually have generous free tiers that should suit most moderately sized projects.