What's this about?
An "Ask HN" thread asking for GitHub replacements drew 517 points and 333 comments — on the same day Cursor launched one.
What exactly are the alternatives being named?
Forgejo is a lightweight, self-hostable Git forge — a community fork of Gitea — and Codeberg is a free public instance of it run by a non-profit, so you can either host it yourself or use theirs. GitLab is the closest feature-for-feature match to GitHub for large organizations, including CI/CD and issue tracking, with an open-source Community Edition you can self-host. Tangled is a newer entrant built on decentralized protocols. The common thread is that all of them can be run on your own infrastructure, which is the actual thing being asked for.
What's the community saying?
HN 517 points, 333 comments
- Forgejo plus Codeberg dominated the recommendations — described as lightweight to self-host, fast to use, and easy to navigate, with Codeberg as the zero-effort option.
- GitLab is the pragmatic answer for organizations. Multiple people running large self-hosted GitLab instances reported being happy with it, with the caveat that you're accepting infrastructure work in exchange for control.
- The AI-crawler tax is now part of self-hosting. The most telling detail: a Forgejo host described maintenance as nearly zero "except protecting it from AI crawlers," with a linked writeup on how.
- The timing was not lost on anyone. The thread ran the same day Cursor launched Origin — one group leaving GitHub for control, another arriving to build something faster.