BookStack, the self-hosted wiki platform, has packed up and left GitHub for Codeberg. Dan Brown, the project's creator, laid out his reasons in a September 2023 issue that became a migration roadmap. The core complaint? GitHub under Microsoft keeps drifting toward becoming an 'AI-powered developer platform' AI workspace tools at the expense of the open source community that built it. Brown pointed to GitHub scraping all public code for AI services without letting developers opt out, swapping functional features for AI-driven ones, GitHub's new workflow tools, and making UX choices that prioritize revenue over users. "Using a platform, and agreeing to terms, from a large company like Microsoft may be a barrier," Brown wrote, noting that BookStack's privacy-conscious audience doesn't mesh well with Microsoft's data practices.
The migration wrapped up with secondary repos moved to Codeberg by July 2024 and the main repository following. The team used Gitea's built-in migration tools to pull over git history, issues, pull requests, and metadata from GitHub's API. They also set up source.bookstackapp.com as a self-hosted mirror, giving them flexibility if Codeberg ever stops working out. The original GitHub repo stays online as a read-only mirror to keep old links working.
But leaving GitHub has real costs. BookStack had roughly 18,000 stars on GitHub, a signal that helps people find and trust the project. Hacker News discussion after the move highlighted a growing split in open source: projects that stay on GitHub for visibility versus those that leave on principle. Brown acknowledged there will be turbulence. External references to the GitHub repository will persist for years after a decade on the platform. That's the trade-off. You get alignment with your values, but you lose the network effects of being where everyone else already is.