this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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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.

(page 2) 50 comments
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I used codeberg and liked it. This is a good reminder to try to stick with it moving forward

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

If I have to search something in a repo, I just clone it and use my IDE. GitHub search sucks, but I don't think it's possible to have a web experience that is on par with an actual environment an IDE.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

Don't worry, their CI is pure garbage.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

That’s not very nice.

To garbage.

I mean, at least in a pinch you can burn some garbage to stay warm. Its going to suck but not as much as actions.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

Which service has better CI? Genuine question

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

selfhosted forgejo, but you have to host it :/

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Account requirements seem like a worthwhile safeguard against spam.

Projects can still use and accept emails or whatever outside of GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Look, I get it that it's trendy to hate on Microsoft, but these complaints don't even make sense. You complain about requiring an account to contribute, and then you propose some other services that do the exact same thing! Turning github into a 4chan style free-for-all is a terrible idea. Maybe that's exactly why you VPN got blocked, because it's enabling spam accounts. And what info are you giving Microsoft to create an account? An email, a password and a username? Not exactly doxxing material, is it? I just searched for some code from one of my repos in incognito and it was the first thing that popped up.

Microsoft is not preventing you from migrating, it's just that there is no standard for issues, discussions, PRs etc. But every other service has an import tool that can do it if needed. And if you're only hosting code (doubt) you're a git remote add & git push away from being free of that evil Microsoft that is hosting all your repos for free.

I hate Microsoft and big corporations just about as much as anyone on Lemmy, but geez, pick your battles people.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If you look at a project on sourcehut while not logged in, you will see instructions on the side how to create a patchset and mail it directly to the maintainer, no account needed.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah and that makes sense. There’s plenty of examples of open source projects that have had their issue trackers flooded with politics rather than real issues and they have to then spend all their time policing and cleaning that up and that’s using GitHub’s user reg system and basic protections against spam accounts. Without requiring any sort of auth or user reg that would be impossible

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I also want to note that in the year 2025, GitHub still does not support IPv6. Folks behind CGNAT in IPv4-starved geos suffer, as does everyone developing for all-IPv6 networks. And it's not like they can't do it, seeing as their various subdomains like pages.github.com have working IPv6 already.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

But people said it wasn't a big deal if microsoft bought it all up!!?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

I hate that they started taking down emulation repos more and more. They have a majority and heavy visibility for companies.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's basically the same even the same plugins mostly work. I believe the biggest changes are on time to market (PRS are quicker but more experimental). And they are doing heavy work on federation.

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