Leaving GitHub: The Self-Hosted Git Movement Is Growing in 2026
Not Because of Outages — Because of Who Owns Your Code
In April 2026, a Hacker News post sparked a massive debate: developer Jorijn Schrijvershof announced he was leaving GitHub for a self-hosted Forgejo instance. The reason wasn't downtime — it was ownership.
Around the same time, the Dutch government launched code.overheid.nl — a self-hosted Forgejo platform for government source code. Project manager Boris Van Hoytema explained the platform was born from the legal requirement that the ministry must own where its code is hosted.
This isn't a movement of the overly cautious. It's a practical response to specific changes on GitHub.
What Happened to GitHub?
Lost Independent Leadership
In August 2025, GitHub no longer had its own CEO. The platform became a unit within Microsoft's CoreAI division — the same group building Copilot and the broader AI stack. GitHub went from an independent company to a piece in Microsoft's AI strategy.
Copilot Training Data: Opt-In Became Default
On April 24, 2026, GitHub changed the default setting: interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users was opt-in by default for AI training. There's no repository-level opt-out.
This means: the code you write, how you interact, your project's context — all of it can be used to train AI without your explicit consent.
Reliability: 257 Incidents in 12 Months
According to IncidentHub, GitHub logged 257 incidents and 48 major outages from May 2025 to April 2026, with roughly 112 hours of downtime. February 2026 alone had 37 incidents.
The most notable: in April 2026, the merge queue's squash-merge code path silently reverted previously merged commits across 658 repositories and 2,092 pull requests. CTO Vlad Fedorov publicly apologized and said capacity needs to grow 30x to handle agentic AI workflow load.
Jurisdiction Risk: FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act
This is what made the Dutch government act. US law — specifically FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act — allows the US government to access data stored on US servers without notifying the data owner.
Microsoft's own attorney confirmed before the French Senate that he could not guarantee EU data was safe from silent US government access.
For developers outside the US, this is a legal risk that can't be ignored.
Forgejo: What's the Alternative?
What Is Forgejo?
Forgejo is a fully open source Git forge, forked from Gitea in 2022. The key difference: Forgejo is community-governed, while Gitea has a more active codebase but a less clear governance model.
According to ossalt.com, if choosing between Forgejo and Gitea in 2026: "Forgejo has stronger community governance, Gitea has the more active codebase. Both run the same Docker image format and are 99% compatible."
Why Forgejo Over GitLab?
The Dutch government chose Forgejo over GitLab because:
- Fully open source — GitLab has proprietary features in its Enterprise tier
- Lightweight — runs well on modest hardware (single NUC)
- Freedom — all the freedoms needed for digital autonomy
Real-World Self-Hosted Architecture
Jorijn Schrijvershof describes his setup:
- Forgejo v15 LTS on a single Intel NUC
- PostgreSQL for the database
- Traefik as reverse proxy
- KVM-isolated Actions runner — weekly rebuilds, isolated with gVisor
- nftables egress filtering — restricted outbound traffic
- Scope-bound tokens — each token has minimal permissions
This isn't a trivial setup. But it's also not overly complex for someone with DevOps experience.
What You Lose When Leaving GitHub
Moving to self-hosted isn't without trade-offs:
- Social graph gone — followers, stars, contribution graph don't transfer
- Actions ecosystem — GitHub Actions has thousands of reusable actions; Forgejo Actions is much smaller
- Dependabot — replaced by Renovate, but requires extra setup
- Enterprise support — none; you're on your own
- Discovery — GitHub is where developers find each other; self-hosted isn't
These are real trade-offs. For developers who need visibility and network effects, GitHub still has value. For those who prioritize ownership and control, self-hosted is the right choice.
Should You Switch?
This isn't a "yes or no" question. It's a matter of how much.
Keep GitHub for:
- Open source projects that need visibility
- Contribution graph and social proof
- Complex GitHub Actions workflows
- Collaboration with teams on GitHub
Move to self-hosted for:
- Private code and proprietary projects
- Code involving compliance/regulatory requirements
- Projects in sensitive jurisdictions
- When you want complete control over your CI/CD pipeline
The practical approach: use both. GitHub for public, self-hosted for private. Git is decentralized — you can push to multiple remotes.
Getting Started with Forgejo: Quick Setup
If you want to try it, Forgejo has a ready Docker image:
docker run -d \
--name forgejo \
-p 3000:3000 \
-p 2222:22 \
-v forgejo-data:/data \
codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:15
Then visit http://localhost:3000 and complete the setup wizard. Takes about 5 minutes.
For production, you'll also need:
- Reverse proxy (Traefik or Nginx)
- SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt)
- PostgreSQL instead of SQLite
- Backup strategy
- Firewall rules
Conclusion
The movement away from GitHub isn't anti-GitHub. It's a response to the trend of concentrating power in a single platform — especially when that platform is owned by a large corporation and the law allows data access without notification.
The Dutch government chose Forgejo. Many developers are doing the same. The question for you: do you want your code to belong to you?
References: