They slowly started locking down the platform for people without accounts and it has been really annoying to use the website since. First it was not possible to search for code, then even searching for issues got more and more difficult with it randomly failing, and now it’s gotten to the point where I can’t search for a fucking project anymore!
Github’s search is becoming as bad as reddit’s, where if you want to find anything, a secondary service like SourceGraph, GrepApp, or even a dumb search engine is better. Sometimes those haven’t indexed what I need (especially code search), so I have to download the bloody tarball and rg for whatever the fuck it is I was looking for.
Sometimes it will also block the VPN I’m using, so I have to proxy to a non-VPNed machine. The world could do without these unnecessary roadblocks.
What also grinds my gears is requiring an account to contribute. There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there, so by if a project being on github, you have no choice but to give Microsoft your data to participate in opensource. Don’t get me wrong, mailing-lists are filth, but and I’d rather claw my eyes out than participate in any project demanding their use, but Microsoft being the “lesser evil” is not a good look.
Please, for the love of opensource, get your project off of github, please. It’s a monopoly at this point and doing microsoft things. This isn’t the end and they’ll probably do more stuff to see how far they can push it. We’ll all be the boiled frogs.
Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features, but if all you’re doing is hosting your code, please consider an alternative.
Possible alternatives in alphabetic order:
- Codeberg (could have federation in the future)
- Gitlab (has CI)
OneDev (no git SSH clone but feature-rich)not an instance for the public- Radicle (no CI, but federated)
- Sourcehut (minimalist, but fast as fuck)
or maybe others will suggest more.
Codeberg is criminally underrated. The UI is great, it’s 100% open source, it has CI, and it will have federation in the future. It’s a shame more people don’t use it. Piefed/river and a bunch of cool niche projects are on it though :D
The lemmy developers should seriously think of moving lemmy to codeberg, it’d be in line with lemmy’s anti-corporate stance.
The choice every developer has to make is between having a potentially successful project, with contributors and community engagement, or hosting their stuff on an open platform. PeerTube even has a GitLab of their own, and yet they host their main software on GitHub, because they simply have to.
Yep, codeberg is great for personal/hobby or small projects, but beyond that it’s not ideal. The worst part is git is a decentralized protocol; yet github has centralized it, basically forcing developers to use it if they want their projects to live, or get a job. It’s a vicious cycle.
But i still think developers should migrate to codeberg, if all of us just wait for codeberg to get big to use it, there’d be no users in the first place. Even if you put your project as a mirror, it’s still a step, or even better: vice versa, see river.
That’s BS, if the software’s good people (i.e. devs) will find the source, unless all they do is spent their day on the github website.
Most fine software i find is through social media and websites, i then proceed to checkout the code.I get that, and I even made an account on PeerTube’s GitLab just to submit a tiny fix on a secondary project of theirs, but do you think an average issue submitter would bother? I do not. And it’s not as simple as this process separating the wheat from the chaff, either.
You picked one concern of multiple: Code discoverability of an already known project.
Multiple times I have found project sources on their own platforms, and when I would have contributed tickets or code, I did not because of requiring yet another account on yet another platform, with whatever yet unknown signup workflow.
And there is man other concerns, some of which the comment you are replied to mentioned.
For yet another account i use a password manager and an email address i only use for crap. It’s a one time process.
If that’s too much for you then perhaps you’re not that interested in contributing to <project>?Exactly. It’s a matter of barrier and interest. Signup requirements are a barrier to drive-by improvements and reports, and them as entry points to further contributions.
I really don’t understand it.
It is 5 minutes to create an account and you can even use the same SSH key everywhere technically.
Then just put a bit config per website and it literally requires nearly 0 additional work ever. You can commit to all the different places practically simultaneously.
I guess you have to go to different websites for issues and I don’t know if codeberg specifically has CI/CD tools, but I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
the actual problem is not that you need an additional account, but as OP said, the terms. with an account they can tie all your searches, what repos have you visited and how often, and other non-public activities to you. basically the same data mining that youtube, facebook and others do, just in an earlier stage
I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
Herd mentality, it affects devs too.
Pushing commits is just one of many concerns.
Do you want to suggest synchronizing issue tickets as well?
I am not talking about federated git repos. You are right, that is a huge undertaking with many issues to overcome.
I am simply talking about dev’s willingness to work only within X Y or Z website’s ecosystem even if another project they want to contribute to exists on another ecosystem (for example KiCAD which exists on their own gitlab instance and needs a separate account or gadgetbridge on Codeberg). It is enough to stop many people from contributing.
Only if they measure their success in terms of traffic on a Microsoft web site.
Successful projects predate GitHub.
They are on Codeberg, but it’s only as a github mirror.
I didn’t know, thanks. But last commit was 8 months ago :(
I support moving off GH but
There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there
Currently this is the case everywhere? With the exception of projects that take email patches, currently all the options are centralised/not federated, and even if e.g. Forgejo finished adding ActivityPub integration you’d still need an account on some Forgejo instance to contribute. Same for email patches; they still require having an email address. If it’s specifically about giving MS your data, sure, although iirc the only data they actually require is an email address. You can use duckduckgo’s duck addresses to get one that’s relatively anonymous (i.e. can be deanonymised by duckduckgo but I doubt anyone’s conspiring that hard to deanonymise a random github user).
Pretty sure gitlab requires you to enter a CC to make an account as well, which turned me off from submitting a bug report a few weeks or so back
Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features
Github actions are terrible - fight me.
commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: actions commit: Another actions fix commit: Fixing actions commit: Fixed issue with actions commit: Actions not logging in properly commit: typo in actions commit: Created GH actions!Just commit to a different branch, and then rebase to main. If you’re putting this shit into main, it’s not the tool’s fault.
Lol this is literally me right now. (Well waiting for another run to probably fail) So also on here.
Let me generalize that - yaml pipelines are terrible 😀
Whenever I need to fix something with them, I go onto a separate branch, write a sane commit message once and suffix it with a “1”. Then the next time, I just grab the same
git commitcommand from my history and change the “1” to a “2”, then to a “3” etc…
Complaining about needing an account to contribute is wild to me.
You’re not okay with anonymous malicious prs? How prude! /s
I read it as needing a Microsoft account, and having to accept Microsft’s terms and conditions, in order to contribute to an unrelated (and probably open-source) project. That’s a valid complaint.
The problem is that you end up using software that’s hosted on GitHub and then you’d like to report a bug or contribute a fix. You also don’t want to give your data to Microsoft. Both can be true, because the projects on GitHub don’t exist in isolation there.
idk, the only “personal data” GitHub requires is an email address… If you don’t have a throwaway one not associated to your identity yet, what are you even doing on the internet :D
I see projects move over to Gitlab a lot lately, but without porting over the issues. That means a huge amount of history and discussions are lost. If you want to find out why something is the way it is, old issues would be a goldmine. Sometimes they are still up on archived GitHub, but not always.
It’s a shame because how gitlab is basically begging to be bought out and hides a lot of useful features behind subscriptions… I remember when it was originally just a GitHub clone way back when.
It was easy enough to introduce Git with a self hosted Gitea at my work place 4 years ago. I see Codeberg is based on a fork of Gitea called Forgejo, so I guess it is also good.
They forked gitea when the gitea devs created an Ltd to help fund development of the platform. I also remember some noise around the same time when gitea took an extra day to release a security patch.
They’ve got about half of the activity of gitea which is pretty impressive considering they’re entirely off github, even if they have 1/4 of the contributors in the same time (9 vs 38)
without these unnecessary roadblocks
But then how will they harvest your data?
I’ve stopped using github because I hate advertising and nags. Probably most people don’t care much about it, but for me github nagging and ‘reminding’ me about copilot is just so off-putting that I immediately want to leave the site. I don’t want my attention stolen like that.
whats funny is I was working in an azure shop and we got rate limited on api calls that caused all sorts of issues and for modern times it really was not a lot of calls. Much less internal calls from a customer on one of the big three cloud computing providers. Seriously!!! Oh and their support was like. Yeah it will do that.
Can confirm this type of thing. Under the Microsoft umbrella stuff doesn’t get special treatment or exemptions from rate limits.
Instead we make multiple accounts and randomly pick ones to use for various api calls. We waste time fighting with secondary rate limits for them as well as guess how to avoid them.
Ooof its been awhile and honestly just going back and getting details on the issue is something Im generally paid to do but I can say we got the account from our infrastructure folks and it was seperate from what they were using but it actually impacted them moving vms in a batch script. we were just grabbing metric and metadata.
This has been the agreed-upon way to do things within the MS umbrella for a while. Not sure why they won’t just allow for setting a higher rate limit.
Each app registration in a tenant gets their own limits. Most backup platforms for an MS tenant have you register 4-10 apps so it can parallelize the backup load without getting rate limited.
I sound like a corporate shill but like, I don’t know if this is due to abuse.
GitHub actions and certain things were free until the crypto bros started abusing it. There are certain challenges that happen at scale.
The thing is, having a “centralized” place makes it easier to cooperate with others, with a single account. Monopoly is probably not the right word here, because nobody is really dependent on Github. And the core functionality of hosting the code and builds for free does come at no cost (money) at all. All Git functionality work. It is still Git.
I don’t see anything in Github that is against Open Source and Libre Software. The features like searching might not be optimal, but that’s just a feature of the site. On the other hand, I’m also just a little guy who does scripting and small CLI tools. So it does not matter at all what I do. In the end, I do not feel the need to stop using Github, despite disliking Microsoft a lot.
nobody is really dependent on Github
If that were true, moving away from github would be ezpz.
The features like searching might not be optimal
Requiring an account to find a project = not optimal is an understatement, IMO.
I’m also just a little guy who does scripting and small CLI tools. So it does not matter at all what I do
That sounds an awful lot like a fallacy. If you wait longer, then when something does drive you to say “I should switch”, you’ll run into the sunken cost issue. If you think you’re unimportant, that’s great for github because they have thousands of people that think they are unimportant but it adds up. You could be part of the solution, no matter how small.
Github outside of hosting the actual git repo largly just provides good routes for collaboration, namely issues, their PR system and some convenient rules on who is allowed to mess with branches and how (IE you can set master to only accept merges done via github themselves). CI is the real lock in far as your git repo is concerned cause that just won’t work at all on another host
Gitea and forgejo have gh compatible actions, thank god. GitLab’s ci was awful from my experience
I’m right now in the process of creating accounts to publish a VSCode extension. But the choices are either Microsoft (marketplace) or Open-vsx.org which requires github account which is also Microsoft, so … Eclipse foundation is acting totally anti-open-source it seems.
Enshittification is everywhere.
That’s M$ doing their EEE-dance as usual. Actions is pretty egregious, my company’s decided that All must be in the cloud™, even CI/CD, so Actions it is… Soon enough, bit by bit, a lot will depend on GitHub’s functionality and there you have it, full circle, it’ll be a pain to move elsewhere. Or do you still think all GitHub is is a git front-end?
well codeberg’s CI system is almost a copy of github actions, so there’s that
Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.
Fucking… Goddammit Gitlab!
Account requirements seem like a worthwhile safeguard against spam.
Projects can still use and accept emails or whatever outside of GitHub.
