Some people are moving away from GitHub. Kev Quirk is thinking about it too:

It’s like leaving Facebook - when I was thinking about it, I was worried if I’d miss my friends or be out the loop. It’s been over a decade at this point and I don’t miss it one bit - no regrets whatsoever. I think moving off of GitHub would be the same.

For me, I care the most about controlling my blog. Where my code lives is less important to me. Git is already distributed. If you moved a repo from GitHub to Codeberg, it wouldn’t be any less centralized than before. So that makes the question more about whether you have strong opinions about GitHub and Microsoft. (Which many people do!)

Micro.blog has 100+ repos on GitHub right now. Some are forks of projects that we can live without, but there are at least dozens that matter a lot to us. I personally can’t justify the switching costs for all of those repos and any potential collaborators, not when there are so many other things to work on for the open web that I feel are more critical to get right.

I completely understand that the equation may be different for other developers. When I quit Twitter ages ago, it was important for me to stick to my principles even with the cost of leaving. If there wasn’t a cost, it wouldn’t mean anything. So I respect the choice.

I’ll be curious to hear how it works out for people. Not just right now when it feels pretty good, but a year from now when we have some perspective on the good and bad of switching.

The thing about having a blog for 24 years at the same domain name (and 17 years of podcasting) is that it should be clear what I believe in by now. I’ve never deleted or significantly edited a post. My life and work are either a very long con, plotted out half my life ago, or the posts are just plainly what they are.

This is also why I’m happy to let AI bots crawl my site. Asking AI for a summary of me is fascinating and largely correct. I asked ChatGPT (in a private browser window) and it came up with this:

Some people prefer a quieter web presence and I totally get that too. I very rarely blog about my family, preferring to keep those thoughts to a private journal. But you really can’t beat a blog for slowly building an online record over years and decades.

I love discovering a blog and realizing I can wander through the archive of older posts. In the era of information overload and slop, that kind of consistency is harder to fake.

Haven’t started a blog yet? Today is a perfect day to begin.