Developers Are Ditching GitHub — Ghostty, Zig, and More Lead an Exodus to Codeberg and Self-Hosting

High-profile open-source projects are abandoning GitHub over downtime, AI training concerns, and political disputes. Codeberg and self-hosted Forgejo/Gitea are the beneficiaries.

GitHub hosts over 600 million repositories and signs up a new user every second. But beneath those headline numbers, a quiet exodus is underway — and it involves some of open source's most prominent projects.

Ghostty, the cross-platform terminal emulator created by Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder of HashiCorp), announced in April 2026 that it was leaving the platform. Hashimoto, GitHub user #1299 since February 2008, wrote that GitHub is "not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done."

Zig, the systems programming language positioned as a spiritual successor to C, made its departure in November 2025. The project had been on GitHub since its first commit in 2015. Tenacity, the cross-platform audio editor, left in 2023 and now only maintains a mirror. Other departures include the Dillo web browser and the Hare programming language.

The reasons boil down to three categories. Downtime: IncidentHub tracked 112 hours of major outages at GitHub between May 2025 and May 2026 — the driver behind Ghostty and Zig's migrations. AI: GitHub's aggressive Copilot integration and CEO Thomas Dohmke's comment that "either you embrace AI, or get out of this career" alienated many maintainers who don't want their code used as training data without consent. Politics: Zig creator Andrew Kelley cited GitHub's relationship with ICE, and broader dissatisfaction with Microsoft's stewardship continues to simmer.

Where are they going? Codeberg, a nonprofit forge based in the EU running Forgejo (a Gitea fork), is the most popular destination. Others are self-hosting using Gitea or Forgejo, often behind WireGuard or Tailscale. Self-hosters report zero-cost CI with unlimited minutes, centralized private registries, and freedom from the risk of wrongful account bans.

Hacker News commenters who made the switch report high satisfaction. One user running self-hosted Forgejo described it as "smoother, faster, and distraction-free." Another who switched to Gitea noted they now pay nothing for CI that was previously costing them through GitHub Pro and Docker Build Cloud.

GitHub isn't going anywhere — its network effects are enormous. But for a growing number of maintainers, the calculus has shifted: the cost of staying now outweighs the cost of leaving.

Sources:

• How-To Geek: Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
• Mitchell Hashimoto: Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub
• Hacker News discussion