Digital Sovereignty: why I am willing to ditch convenience for ideals

Effort: This is a rough first draft of some thoughts I have

GitHub is the largest cloud-based platform for code hosting. It acts as a community portal, allowing your projects to be discovered by other potential users or collaborators. It is also owned by Microsoft, a company that has been heavily pushing LLM coding tools and using user's code on GitHub as training data for LLMs. There are many more reasons one would want to leave GitHub, but what do you leave behind in doing so?

What if you wanted to have control over the platform you used, instead of the platform controlling you? Meet Codeberg, a non-profit, community-led Git hosting platform. And community-led is not just a buzzword used by the marketing department, Codeberg is an association meaning the members vote on the direction of the platform. And if you don't like it you can always migrate to another Forgejo instance or host one yourself, it's open source!

This all sounds great but there are some downsides. Significantly less people use Codeberg so for collaboration you will have to convince people to migrate. For solo-projects or projects you maintain this is easier, but you do lose the ability to be found on GitHub with it's more extensive userbase. But change needs to start somewhere, so going forward my personal and academic projects will be hosted on Codeberg.