As a lot of people, I had most of my code published on GitHub. During my #unplugTrump (reduce the amount of US services), I decided that I want to move my code somewhere else. Codeberg came totally handy and was recommended a lot.
Before I even really arrived there, Codeberg reacted to the increased resource demands of vibe / agentic coding and changed their TermsOfUse accordingly. To be honest, I didn’t follow the (heated) debates in detail but as I peceived, they aim for projects where code isn’t generated and projects that have a community and not just a single developer.
That made me reconsider my decision: I play around with code generators as well, and – in my entire life – none of my projects managed to get enough attention to get more than me as developer. Well, as I don’t plan to hammer the infrastructure, I don’t think I would ever have gotten on the radar.
But it was another issue that was more important to me:
I left GitHub to become independent from a U.S. service — and ended up in a dependency to another entity. And I noticed that I just wasn’t consistent: When I really aim for sovereignty, I should host the code under my own domain, not just somewhere else – I wanted to aim for a higher level of sovereignty, as I described in another blogpost.
But … this would require one of
- if I want full GIT support:
- another VPS to host for example a Forgejo instance (replacing my local instance that I have running at home)
- an online mirror Forgejo instance (ending up in 2 instances – overkill)
- opening my instance at home from the web — which also requires a VPS as a reverse proxy or expose the server completely
- if I want limited GIT support: some sort of static / dynamic project pages with a git archive / bare repo, hosted on my already available Shared Webhosting
And as much as it was fun to think it through, in the end I asked the one crucial question:
“What for!?“
For the some few projects that I publish, I don’t expect contributions … So, extra administrative workload (I’m talking about my free time here) and additional financial invest can’t really be justified. Especially, as server administration is not exactly one of my favourite things to do.
This leaves me with two options:
- just don’t put the code online
- try to make some bare minimum project pages rendered from the Readme.md files and put them on my shared webhost.
Honestly, I haven’t decided yet … Investing time, just for the sake of putting it online? I guess, I need to find something that makes it an enjoyable task / project, before I invest some time. Until then, my code has vanished from the web (except some repos that I leave at GitHub as they are linked to in publications).
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