Note: as of 2025 05 20 this website won't be updated anymore. Consider inactive unless stated otherwise.

Why not GitHub?

Security issues

GitHub forces you to use TOTP if you want to use 2FA, even if you have multiple passkeys and security keys enrolled. They also use SHA1 for the secret. There used to be a workaround involving GitHub Mobile, but they "patched" it and now you are forced to enable insecure authentication.

This means that even if you want to use 2FA that isn't security threatre, you can't.

What makes this even more outrageous is the fact that GitHub alternatives like Codeberg, which is based on Forgejo don't do this and allow you to just use security key 2FA. Additionally at least in the case of Codeberg, if you do use TOTP, they use a more secure hashing algorithm that hasn't been cracked years ago.

Microsoft

Lack of Transparency

GitHub loves to shadowban you. I have had it happen to me multiple times, and their support is not very helpful. That is, if they feel like responding at all.

One of the reasons why they might shadowban you, is because you used an email they don't like, that doesn't even have to be an alias too, if they don't like the domain for whatever reason, you're getting shadowbanned, which you won't know until you try to access one of your repos while logged out or try to delete your account. If you are shadowbanned, GitHub won't let you delete your account unless you contact support.

(None of this is stated in their TOS)

Also GitHub can ban you or remove your repository for a million different reasons stated in their TOS.

Centralization

Centralization is not a good thing, especially with profit-seeking corporation, which will do anything, even hire actual death squads or aid in a genocide^1,2 if it gives them profit.

I am not arguing for federation, that brings it's own share of issues. But Forgejo for example can be self-hosted and modified, which means there is less of a central power.

Delete, Delete, Delete

Just like Google and similair corporations, Microsoft loves to extinguish old content, which causes a bunch of dead links. Needless to say, this is not a good thing.

Forced AI

GitHub forces Copilot on you. AI needs to scrape work from actual humans to generate content, which often isn't very good. also see GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

If you're wondering why GitHub likes AI so much, see Is AI a Buzzword?, it's self-explanatory.

Bugs

GitHub often has bugs, notifications not being delivered, commits not being shown, etc.

I personally have had absolutely awful experiences with GitHub Pages. Sometimes it might take half an hour to update the Page with a single line change or just not build your page at all.

In my opinion, Codeberg offers the best static-page hosting experience, you can only have one per account, but the url will be a lot nicer: username.codeberg.page, and it updates usually within seconds. I never had to wait more than 5min for the page to update.