Hey everyone.

We’re writing this blog post to inform you, that we are moving our main development, issue tracking and other things from GitHub, onto our own self hosted platform, CodeHub, powered by Gitea.

This process will take place over several months, and in stages, to allow things to go smoothly.

First, the why though?

GitHub is good, and loved my millions of developers around the world, including myself. However, recently, the platform has gotten a bigger pain in my ass, day by day. My time for development is little these days with my work life, and twice in a row when I decided, and had the time to do releases, GitHub completely shat itself….

Just yesterday, I was getting ready to release Simple Discord Link and Pocket Machines updates that have been pending for well over a month, only to have GitHub break down at the exact moment I needed it. During the previous release cycle, GitHub went offline right in the middle of deployment.

Along with all that, AI crap being shoved into EVERY corner of GitHub is enough to make any dev who still cares about their hobby/job sick. I don’t need AI to open an issue report for me. I need my source control platform to work, when I need it to work.

Aside from all this, long on-going annoyances of spam raids on repos, UI elements being broken or out of place, and some features of GitHub just completely not working as it should in certain browsers, like Firefox (and no, I am not switching to chrome….)

Why self hosted? Why not GitLab?

Simplest answer: I am banned from GitLab. Why? No clue. I registered my account, and got banned before I even received my email confirmation email….

Aside from that, I find GitLab to be clunky and not at all user friendly for non-devs, aka the users who just want to report an issue. Self Hosting GitLab is also not an option, because more than half of the features are paywalled, and it literally uses more resources than Chrome with 20 tabs open, while doing nothing.

How does this affect users and contributors?

Well, in two ways:

1) We will be disabling issues on all repos once they are moved over

2) We will no longer accept pull requests or contributions to repos on GitHub. It has to be done on CodeHub instead.

How will this work?

All our existing repos will remain on GitHub indefinitely. However, they will simply act as “mirrors” or “backups”. Any code contributed to the repos on CodeHub, will automatically be pushed back to GitHub as well. These repos will be renamed to projectname-mirror to indicate that they are just mirror repos.

Users looking to report bugs, or contribute code/documentation fixes etc, can do so on CodeHub, using their existing GitHub or Discord accounts. You don’t need to sign up for a new account, BUT, the option is there if you prefer it.

Since Gitea is almost 1:1 compatible with Git tools, including GitHub desktop, you can continue to use them as is.

While we won’t allow non-fdd members to create repos on CodeHub, you can still fork our repos to submit changes and contributions.

We will update all the relevant links and resources, once a repo has been migrated over.

In closing

Yes, a lot of you may be going WTF, this is bullshit, and yes, to some extend I agree with you, however, this is also not a new practice.

Lots of devs use their own Git systems. For example, LiteLoader has its own GitLab instance. Some other mod devs also have their own forgejo or gitea instances.

Others like CDAGaming, use GitLab as a primary, and mirror back to GitHub. So it’s not strange practice to do so.

That being said, if this change doesn’t work out, or GitHub can show some real improvement, this change will be reconsidered. We might go back to just using GitHub, and using CodeHub as a mirror. Time will tell