Okay so I've been putting off writing this post for weeks because honestly I wasn't sure how much I wanted to share. But enough people have asked what happened with Ultimate Media Downloader that I figure I owe everyone an explanation. Fair warning: this is long. Make a coffee.
Late March 2026. Everything was normal. I was pushing updates, answering issues, doing the usual open-source maintainer thing. Nothing felt off. I had notifications from GitHub, I was working on a fix for a bug that had been annoying me for days, and life was... fine, you know? Boring good. The kind of good you don't appreciate until it's gone.
Then GitHub suspended my account.
Day One: The Screen That Broke My Brain
I'm not going to pretend I handled it gracefully. I did not.
I opened GitHub to push a commit and got the suspension screen. My brain kind of just... stopped for a second. I reread it three times thinking I was somehow misreading it. I wasn't.
The reason they gave was vague. Something about policy violations and suspicious activity. I genuinely had no idea what I'd done. I mean — I host a media downloader. I've always known that sits in a gray area. But I wasn't the first person to do this, and there are way bigger projects doing the exact same thing still sitting on GitHub right now, so I figured I'd just... appeal it and it'd get sorted.
Reader, it did not get sorted quickly.
Shouting Into the GitHub Support Void
Have you ever submitted an appeal to a large tech platform? It's a specific kind of miserable. You write this really thoughtful, detailed explanation. You cite examples. You reference other projects. You basically build a legal case for why your account should be reinstated. And then you get back an email that reads like it was written by someone who definitely did not read your email.
That was my week two.
I sent multiple follow-ups. I explained that the software is a tool and that tools don't have intent. I pointed out YouTube-DL, which does functionally the same thing and had its own GitHub drama a few years back. Nothing landed. Or if it did, nobody told me.
What made it worse — and this is the part that kept me up at night — is that I had users. Real people relying on auto-updates that pulled from GitHub releases. My version checker hit the GitHub API. Everything was tangled up with my account. And I was locked out.
By about day ten I stopped waiting and started planning.
The Backwards Move That Actually Worked
I'm skipping over some of the specifics here because honestly they're boring and a bit embarrassing. But the short version is: I managed to get temporary access to the repo through some recovery options I'd forgotten I'd set up years ago.
My first instinct when I got in was to back everything up. And then I made what felt like a weird call at the time: I made the repository private.
I know that sounds backwards. "Your project is already invisible because your account is suspended, why would you make it more invisible?" But my thinking was — if GitHub sees a popular public repo suddenly go private, maybe they interpret that as me taking security concerns seriously rather than being a bad actor. It was a gamble.
Turns out it kind of worked? I started getting slightly less robotic responses from their support team. Something shifted. I don't know exactly what, and I'm not going to pretend I do.
Back In, But Not Really Welcome
They reinstated the account. With conditions attached. Basically: the main repo for Ultimate Media Downloader couldn't stay as-is. Too "potentially problematic." That was their phrase, not mine.
So I was back. But it didn't feel like a win. It felt like being let back into a party where the host is clearly not happy you're there. You're standing by the snack table and every few minutes someone glances at you and you're like — yeah I know, I know.
That was the moment I actually started taking Codeberg seriously.
Fine. Let's Try This Codeberg Thing.
I'd known Codeberg existed for a while. I'd seen it mentioned in open-source forums and had vaguely filed it away as "GitHub but smaller and European." Never felt urgent enough to actually explore.
Now it felt urgent.
I spent a day on the platform just clicking around. And the first thing I noticed was how — I don't know how to say this without sounding cheesy — how genuine it felt? There's no AI assistant trying to summarize your commits. No featured marketplace pushing you to buy things. No weird enterprise upsell banners. It's just a git hosting platform run by a non-profit that actually believes in what it's doing.
That shouldn't be a revelation. But after the GitHub experience it kind of was.
The other thing I noticed: nobody there was going to suspend my account for hosting a media tool. Because they actually care about software freedom. Not performatively — actually.
By end of week four I'd made up my mind.
The Actual Migration
This part is less dramatic than the rest of the story. Migrations are mostly just tedious, not traumatic.
I updated the README. Changed the clone URLs. Updated the version checker endpoint from GitHub's API to Codeberg's. Went through the contributing docs, the code of conduct, the issue templates — every file that had a github.com link in it. Found more than I expected. One of them was buried in a comment inside a Python file that I'd written like two years ago and completely forgot about. That took a minute.
Total time: maybe a day and a half, spread over two days because I kept getting distracted.
The harder part was more psychological. I'd been on GitHub for years. All my institutional memory of "where things live" pointed there. Switching platforms meant rewriting some mental muscle memory, which sounds small but isn't.
But once it was done? I felt weirdly relieved.
Where We're At Now
It's late April. The project lives on Codeberg now. Everything works. Updates go out, the version checker works, people are downloading things just fine.
The Codeberg community is smaller. That's real. Fewer people stumble across your project because there's no algorithm surfacing it. But the people who do find it seem more... intentional? Like they were looking for something specific rather than just scrolling. I've had better issue reports in the last few weeks than I used to get in a month.
I still have my GitHub account. I'm using it mostly to mirror things over there, just so people who bookmarked old URLs don't hit dead ends. But I'm not building anything like that there anymore.
But still using the githb to showcase my previous successful project and more. because i don't want to sart over all of it again.
The Actual Takeaway
I don't want to wrap this up with some neat lesson because the experience wasn't neat.
It was stressful. I was anxious for basically a month straight. I sent emails to GitHub support that I now find slightly embarrassing in retrospect. I lost sleep. My project went dark for a stretch of time and I couldn't even tell users why because I didn't fully understand why myself.
But — and I mean this — I wouldn't have moved to Codeberg if it hadn't happened. I was too comfortable. Sometimes that's what it takes.
If you're one of the users who noticed things were broken and didn't get an explanation at the time: I'm sorry. That sucked and you deserved better communication from me. I was in reactive mode and honestly just trying to keep the thing alive.
It's alive. It's on Codeberg. Come find it there.
One more thing
I still have like four documentation files somewhere that probably have a github.com URL hiding in them. I'll find them eventually. If you spot one before I do, open an issue. On Codeberg, obviously.
— NK2552003
Writing from my home office which is definitely a real office and not just my bed with a laptop