Github FOMO

We’re coming up to about a year-and-a-half of moving my code to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. So far it’s been great, but I will admit that I am suffering from a bit of Github FOMO. So much of the technical world assumes your code lives on Github. Many tools assume you’re either pushing code, or distributing binaries via Github. None of the AI coding assistances work with anything other than Github.

Even when you’re considering whether you should advertise where the source code of your open-source projects, it feels a little funny posting a link to an SCM that is not Github. Open-source development is a social activity, and I doubt it helps the appeal of your project in the eyes of potential contributors if your code is not where they tend to be. Doubly so when when you consider that they’ll need to create an account on your SCM service to contribute.

There are other costs that I haven even considered, like the stability of external services your open-source SCM relies on. I found I wasn’t able to run any CI/CD builds last night because Codeberg was down and the pipelines were unable to fetch the Git checkout action. The idea of relying on services hosted by volunteers is a nice one, but I can imagine Microsoft’s SLAs being a lot stricter when it comes to keeping Github online.

So yeah, it’s cold and lonely out here. I’ll keep at it though: I think the benefits that come from having my own place for my code is worth it. But I do wonder if I should move some projects back, at least some of the “big” ones. Not that any of the projects I’m working on need contributors, but just to be where others are. There’s still value in that.