We moved to Codeberg!

Jacky Song | July 05, 2025

I'm excited to announce that Project Elara is now officially on Codeberg! In this article, we'll explain why we made the move from GitHub to Codeberg, and what it means for the Project.

Why we moved away from GitHub

As those following Project Elara probably know, our repositories of open-source code and creative works was previously hosted on GitHub. At the beginning of the Project, GitHub worked well: it has the largest audience of open-source developers anywhere, and GitHub pages helped us easily host our project website.

However, GitHub is proprietary, and it is operated by a for-profit company that could (in theory) close down GitHub at any time, particularly if it is deemed financially unprofitable. While (to GitHub's credit) this has not yet happened, and we earnestly hope it will not happen for years to come, it is a major risk to the future of the Project. As an organization focused on ensuring that our code and work stays accessible well into the future, we cannot take the chance that one day, our website, source code, and infrastructure could all be shut down or lost.

So, we've moved to Codeberg, which, unlike GitHub, is run by its community and is a non-profit organization whose bylaws stipulate that if it gets dissolved, its assets will be transferred to another public corporation that will continue its work. This not only gives us reassurance that hosting our software and open-source work here will keep them safe for years into the future, but also means that we're using an open-source platform to support our open-source work. Having an open-source ecosystem is vital for the health of open-source projects; becoming reliant on a proprietary platform like GitHub puts us in a vulnerable position, but choosing Codeberg and other open-source platforms like it safeguards us well into the future.

Note: Please donate to Codeberg if you can to support the future of open-source software!

Our plans for what to do next

Moving to Codeberg was a surprisingly easy process thanks to Codeberg's GitHub migration tools that allowed us to transfer repositories right over from GitHub with all pull requests and issues left intact. The more difficult part, and the one that will take more time, is to slowly update our repositories to change references to GitHub to new Codeberg ones, but this should be sorted out with time.

In addition, we don't want to just stop here - we want to move our other infrastructure to open-source platforms as much possible:

• Email from Gmail to Nextcloud Mail (or similar)
• Wiki/markdown editor from Obsidian to Logseq
• Community chat from Discord to Matrix
• Meetings from Zoom and Webex to Jitsi Meet
• Creating regular backups of our web-hosted content with Webrecorder
• Managing our finances on OpenCollective

Of course, these will take time, so unfortunately we're stuck with (mostly) proprietary software for now. But using Codeberg as our forge is a step in the right direction, and it means we're already a big part of the way there.

Overall, we're very glad to have made this move, especially because the best time to move is early: the longer we waited and the more infrastructure we had on GitHub, the harder the move would've been. We're glad to have our work built on top of open-source software maintained by a nonprofit that has the same goals we do: to make sure that the future is in good hands.