May 20, 2026
Commits, chaos, and custody battles
Handling the great code forge fragmentation
GitHub breakup rumors spark a messy fight over where coders should live online
TLDR: Alex Selimov says coders should prepare for a world where GitHub is no longer the only big home for software, and he wants better trust systems to fight spammy AI submissions. Commenters instantly split into camps: some say this breakup is overdue, others say GitHub is still too big to fail.
The article starts with a very online developer anxiety dream: what happens if everyone slowly stops using GitHub, the giant website where huge amounts of software live? Alex Selimov argues that the split is already happening, with people drifting toward places like Codeberg, self-run sites, and GitLab. He even built a tool to combine his activity from different sites into one glorious contribution chart, because yes, the humble little heatmap has become a full-blown status symbol. But the real fireworks came from the comments, where readers basically turned the post into a custody battle over the future of coding.
One camp was deeply unimpressed. Why should anyone do all this extra work? asked one commenter, shrugging that software has always been scattered around the internet and that old-school email still works fine. Another went even bigger: calling “fragmentation” a feature, not a bug, arguing that software sharing was always meant to be spread out, not trapped on one mega-site again. Then came the protocol evangelists, blasting the article for not mentioning atproto and similar ideas that could connect different sites together like one big network. And hovering over everything was the AI panic: Selimov wants a trust system to keep out bot-made junk contributions, but skeptics warned GitHub isn’t dying anytime soon because businesses and AI tools are still glued to it. Translation: the community agrees something weird is happening — they just can’t agree if it’s a collapse, a correction, or a nerdy overreaction.
Key Points
- •The article describes increasing fragmentation among code hosting platforms, with GitHub users considering alternatives such as Codeberg, self-hosted Forgejo, and GitLab.
- •Alex Selimov built a Go script and Hugo module to generate a unified Git contribution heatmap across multiple hosting providers.
- •The tool is intended to solve the problem of tracking public development activity split between GitHub and a self-hosted Forgejo instance.
- •The article identifies AI-generated pull requests and issues as a scaling problem for open-source maintainers due to submission volume from unvetted sources.
- •Mitchell Hashimoto’s vouch project is presented as an example trust system that uses GitHub Actions and a VOUCHED.td file to record approved or blocked contributors.