For about 7 years I’ve been hosting code on the big platforms. GitHub was just what I defaulted to. Everyone else used it so I figured why not.
But something started bugging me over the past 18 months. I couldn’t shake this feeling that my code wasn’t actually mine anymore.
I’m not trying to sound like some privacy extremist. I just kept thinking about where my code actually lived and who really controlled access to it. When you’re building something that matters to you, you want some say in how it gets hosted and managed.
What Actually Changed My Mind
Last spring I was working on a web scraping tool to collect pricing data from e-commerce sites for a small business client who needed market intelligence. I needed to test it against different geographic locations so I set up a residential proxy service to route requests through real IP addresses scattered across the country.
That’s when something clicked. I was paying $43 monthly for proxy services to maintain privacy in my scraping operations but hosting all my actual source code on servers I didn’t control at all.
Kind of backwards, honestly.
The real wake-up call came when a colleague’s account got flagged. False positive. Two weeks of back-and-forth with support and no access to repositories during that entire time. I remember thinking what if that happened to me right before a client deadline?
Making the Switch
I won’t pretend it was instant or easy. Took me about 3 weeks to migrate everything properly and I definitely broke some things along the way. But I found Codeberg and it felt different right away. Non-profit structure. Community-driven development. Servers in Europe that they actually control themselves.
My favorite part? No tracking cookies anywhere. No third-party analytics watching what I commit or when I push code at 2am because I can’t sleep. They rely on donations and memberships instead of selling user data or constantly pushing premium tiers in your face.
I’ve moved 14 projects over now. Some are active. Some haven’t been touched in 2 years. They’re all sitting on infrastructure that actually aligns with how I think software development should work.
What I Actually Use Daily
You don’t lose anything essential when you make the switch. Pull requests work fine. Issue tracking exists and functions the same. CI/CD integration took me maybe 30 minutes to set up once I actually read the documentation. The community feels more genuine. People contribute because they actually care about the projects, not because they’re chasing corporate metrics or building their personal brand for recruiters.
I’m not saying everyone should abandon mainstream platforms tomorrow morning. But if you care even a little bit about data sovereignty and supporting commons-based infrastructure, I’d recommend exploring the options. The Codeberg community has grown to over 360,000 users now, with 1,700 members in their non-profit organization.
My clients don’t care where I host my repositories. They care that their projects work and their data stays secure. Self-hosted Git infrastructure helps me deliver on both without compromise.
