Codeberg, the mission‑driven Git host, recently banned projects that consist mainly of generative‑AI code, sparking debate. The move is unsurprising – Codeberg has always positioned itself as an alternative to GitHub, not a neutral platform. Yet many reacted as if the decision had eliminated a viable replacement for the popular service, exposing a gap in the open‑source ecosystem. While there are many places to host a Git repo, few provide the shared social layer – identities, conventions, and discovery – that GitHub offers at scale.

Self‑hosting is often suggested. I’ve run Gitea for years, and it works for personal projects, but for community work it forces everyone to create new accounts and learn new workflows, discouraging contribution. Even discovery suffers: GitHub’s feed previously surfaced projects I would not have found otherwise, a feature now largely absent.

The alternatives vary. GitLab feels corporate and lacks the discovery power; Source Hut is transparent but email‑centric; Forgejo’s federation is experimental; Radicle is peer‑to‑peer but requires CLI use; Tangled, still alpha, focuses on social experience. None fully replaces the social glue that GitHub provides.

A “boring” company could fill the void by offering reliable, scalable collaboration without the ambition of becoming an OS for dev. The key will be treating the social layer as the product, not a by‑product of repository volume.