GitHub is a
discovery layer.
Not a git host.
Here's the migration.
When GitHub suspends your account without notice, without graduated enforcement, and without substantive staff response for 30–90 days, the fastest answer is not to plead with the support queue. The fastest answer is to own your git, mirror to GitHub as discovery surface, and keep working.
What happened to WellBuilder
on April 18, 2026
On the morning of April 18, 2026, at approximately 8:30 AM PT, GitHub suspended the WellBuilder organization. WellBuilder publishes civic-technology MCP servers — one per US area code — as part of the WellSpr.ing covenant-governed civic infrastructure federation. Thirty-two repositories were offline simultaneously. The personal account that owned the organization was also suspended.
No suspension email. No notice. No graduated enforcement. The appeal path, when opened, routed first-line response to an automated reply requesting information already present in the appeal letter. WellSpr.ing responded within minutes with complete information. The account remains suspended at the time of this site's publication.
08:30 AM PT — WellBuilder organization suspended (all 32 repos offline) 08:48 AM PT — WellSpr.ing notified; unable to access account 08:48 AM PT — Appeal submitted via support.github.com ~08:54 AM PT — Auto-reply requests standard identification details 08:55 AM PT — WellSpr.ing replies with complete information — — Substantive response pending as of publication
Documented across sixty cases
The WellBuilder case is not anomalous. A Reddit thread on r/github, maintained by volunteers since 2023, has catalogued approximately sixty suspension cases with the same signature: no email, no graduated enforcement, appeals that queue for 30 to 90 days, and — documented by multiple users — manual reinstatement by staff followed by automated re-suspension within 1 to 5 days.
The affected maintainers are not spammers.
"GitHub suspended my paid account with 62 repos, sent no email and I had to file appeals from a second paid account... If GitHub can do this to a paying customer over a model checkpoint, they can do it to you over anything."— Independent AI researcher, April 2026, r/github thread
GitHub's own Terms of Service Section F requires notice before suspension. The enforcement documentation describes graduated enforcement before termination. Across sixty documented cases, neither commitment appears to be consistently honored.
This site is not about whether GitHub is a net-positive for open-source software. It clearly is, and has been, for more than a decade. This site is about the specific gap between GitHub's stated enforcement commitments and actual enforcement practice — and about the fact that the correction to that gap is individually available to every maintainer. You do not need to wait for GitHub to fix this. You can migrate in an afternoon.
The three-mirror architecture
The core insight: GitHub is a discovery layer, not a git host. The conflation of those two functions is the dependency trap. The formula separates them back out.
git.yourproject.org to your Railway deployment. This is where you push. If GitHub or Codeberg or any other host disappears tomorrow, your git source of truth is unaffected.
git push origin main to your sovereign primary, and it syncs automatically. Suspension of any single mirror is a discoverability event, not a data-loss event.
Platform comparison
| Forgejo (self-hosted) | Codeberg | SourceHut | GitLab CE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Governance | You own it | Nonprofit | Nonprofit | You own it |
| Cost | ~$5–10/mo | Free | Free / paid | Heavier infra |
| PAT / API | Full Forgejo API | Full Forgejo API | REST + email workflow | Full GitLab API |
| Push mirrors | Yes — native | Yes — native | Limited | Yes |
| Speed to deploy | 15 min (Railway) | Instant (signup) | Instant (signup) | Hours (self-host) |
| Best for | Primary sovereign | Community secondary | Minimalist / CLI-first | Org-scale |
Using AI coding tools
without triggering enforcement
A distinct class of suspension cases involves maintainers using AI coding assistants — Claude, Cursor, Copilot Workspace, custom MCP servers — with personal access tokens that make API calls GitHub's detection flags as anomalous. Documented cases include maintainers whose Claude Desktop + GitHub MCP integration was flagged as "token abuse," researchers whose Git LFS pushes of ML checkpoints triggered suspension, and builders whose rapid automation of repository creation (for legitimate federated projects) matched typosquatting heuristics.
These cases are growing. The tooling is ahead of the platform's detection calibration. The mitigation is operational.
repo only, not admin:org unless necessary.git.wellspr.ing
is open to others
The Forgejo instance WellSpr.ing built after the GitHub suspension is open for community registration. If you are an open-source maintainer, civic technologist, or AI developer who wants a self-hosted primary that is not dependent on GitHub's platform decisions, you are welcome here.
The instance runs on Railway with automatic Fly.io edge routing, Bunny CDN, and Codeberg push-mirrors on all WellBuilder repositories. The stack is the same one documented in the Replit cookbook. Registration is open. Accounts are manually reviewed within 24 hours under the WellSpr.ing covenant — which means no predatory content, no commercial scraping, and no surveillance tooling. Civic infrastructure, open-source projects, and AI agent work are exactly what this is for.
Create an Account at git.wellspr.ing → Browse WellBuilder Repos ↗
Two-tier privacy:
GitHub's Copilot policy
Starting today, GitHub is using Copilot interaction data — prompts, completions, code context — to train AI models. The default is opt-in for individual developers. Copilot Business and Enterprise customers are not included because their contracts prohibit training on their data.
The structure of the policy is the structure of the relationship: enterprise customers are partners with contractual protection; individual developers are sources of extractable value unless they navigate to a settings page and toggle a switch. The policy is not anomalous. It is consistent.
This is not the focus of this site. The WellBuilder dossier is about enforcement conduct — the suspension-without-notice pattern. That case stands on its own terms. But the April 24 Copilot policy is worth naming as what it is: a governance choice that treats institutional and individual relationships differently, made visible on the same day individual developers are being asked to trust the platform with their code and their work.
Civic infrastructure should not be built on platforms whose governance treats individual contributors as extractable by default. That is the architectural argument. The April 24 policy is one more reason it is correct.
To opt out: github.com/settings/copilot → "Allow GitHub to use my data to improve GitHub Copilot" → Disabled. This setting must be changed on every account individually.
The pattern gets legible
through documentation
If your GitHub account has been suspended without notice, without graduated enforcement, or re-suspended after manual reinstatement, your case belongs in the corpus. Submissions inform periodic pattern reports and help other maintainers recognize what's happening in their own cases.
Submit an Incident Report →