For years, GitHub sat at the centre of the software world. Though developers might move away from an AI tool like Cursor, Windsurf, or even GitHub Copilot, migrating from GitHub as a platform was never thought of. Well, until now.
A slow stream of exits has turned into something more visible. Individuals are walking out. Small studios are walking out. Entire open source communities are packing up their repos and shifting them to Codeberg, Forgejo, Sourcehut or their own servers.
Their reasons may be different, but the conclusion is the same. GitHub no longer feels like neutral ground.
The Main Reasons
The Dillo browser project is a sharp example. It began as a simple attempt to keep an old web browser alive after its original domain was lost in 2022. What followed is the kind of cautionary tale open source projects fear. The old Dillo website vanished.
Someone else bought the domain and filled it with “AI generated ads”. Mailing lists disappeared. Bug records vanished. The only surviving copy of the code came from a contributor who had created their own backup. That kind of wipeout tends to change how maintainers think.
Rodrigo Arias Mallo, who now maintains Dillo, wrote in his blog that he uploaded everything to GitHub for safety. Then he slowly realised GitHub created its own set of risks.
He wrote that GitHub “barely works without JavaScript”, which means Dillo itself cannot open its own issues, pull requests or logs. He called the website “resource hungry” for no reason at all, and said the platform had turned into a single point of failure.
“It is controlled by a single entity which can unilaterally ban our repository or account,” he said. That fear now sits in the back of every maintainer’s mind, because GitHub has become so central that a ban feels like a kind of lockout from the public square.
AIM reached out to GitHub but the company declined to comment at the moment.
Mallo said that performance issues made it worse. Pages load slower. The site now assumes everyone always has a fast connection. The push model of notifications breaks the quiet, offline style of development that smaller projects still prefer.
What bothered him more was the social side. Issues get crowded by people who are not part of the project, and the moderation tools are thin. It burns maintainers out, fast. Some on Hacker News say that the reason simply seems philosophical, but Mallo believes there are other concerns.
Then came the larger shift. Eldred Habert, a programmer working on security, also wrote a blog that got featured on Hacker News. He claimed that GitHub’s push toward AI locked him out. He wrote that these walls come from the “trend of over-focusing on LLMs and generative AI” that is crushing the open web.
Mallo from Dillo had a similar observation.
Others Are Not Perfect, But Still
GitHub’s role in that trend made him uncomfortable enough to move the project away completely. The result is a tiny, hand-built alternative, a new domain. For Dillo, a self-hosted cgit instance. A bug tracker written in C that stores every issue as plain text and turns them into a static HTML page.
Everything runs on a small VPS. Everything is mirrored across Codeberg and Sourcehut. Everything is signed with OpenPGP so the project can still prove its identity even if the DNS goes down again.
Mallo’s solution is specific to a small browser from another era, but the reasons echo across other exits.
Habert, who moved to Codeberg in September, cited the same reason in fewer words. “Mounting pressure from GitHub pushing AI solutions harder and harder” was the tipping point. “Partnering with Elon Musk (Grok now being supported)”.
“I simply don’t agree with that platform’s policies”. Another said they left as “a form of protest” and now donate to Codeberg. But, these are just philosophical takes.
People are leaving GitHub not because they found a better feature set somewhere else. They are leaving because they do not align with the direction GitHub is going in. That direction is now tied directly to the future of Microsoft ever since Thomas Dohmke, the former CEO, left GitHub.
The Ars Technica report from August captured the change. GitHub will be folded into Microsoft’s CoreAI division. The GitHub CEO is leaving. Microsoft is not replacing the role. The company said GitHub will continue its “mission” inside the AI group. This came after months of deep integration work around Copilot.
It also followed a breach earlier in the year, in which Copilot exposed private code repositories of large companies by accident. The accidents did not slow the rollout. Microsoft kept pushing Copilot deeper into workflows, deeper into editors, deeper into the GitHub interface.
That is the moment the anxiety around GitHub changed. Some developers say that the platform stopped looking like a neutral place to store code and began looking like an input pipeline for Microsoft’s AI strategy.
Users on Hacker News and Reddit read the signs in a similar manner. The announcement that GitHub will sit inside the AI division looked like an echo of what happened to Skype. One comment summed up the mood: “MS bought Skype just to shut it down a few years later without any alternative.”
This is why developers talk about moving before something breaks. Some said GitHub Actions have become unreliable. Others said the site UI has become slow and heavy.
Most alternatives are not perfect either. Testers say GitLab is heavy to run. Gitea has awkward UI moments. Codeberg’s bot checks annoy some users. Sourcehut is fast but uses mailing lists for patches. Forgejo feels like a sweet spot for many small teams because it is light, written in Go, and easy to host.
One studio that moved two years ago said the switch had “positive effects” across the board, because their entire workflow stayed alive even when their internet was down.
These exits are not happening at the scale that would threaten GitHub’s dominance. They are happening for reasons that are quieter, personal and sometimes, philosophical. But they mark a shift that would have been unthinkable five years ago. GitHub used to be the obvious choice. It no longer is.
Nobody is predicting a mass migration.
The post Why Companies are Quitting GitHub appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
