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.
I am seeing a LOT of the emulation crowd over at codeberg and other type of sites. Its gaining some popularity which is nice.
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.
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 never sat foot on github, but moved from some shady place to Codeberg and it’s just fantastic. It just works.
Only thing missing is some 5/10€ monthly plan where you get a golden leaf or something :-p
On a more serious note, gotta check out how to support them in some meaningful way.
I’m looking forward to when they implement fediverse integration.
Yeah. I know in my heart that I will get off my ass and move some projects over to Codeberg after federation arrives.
While I agree about most of your gripes. I don’t think requiring an account to contribute is unreasonable. I can underdtand not wanting to create an account and give them personal info and such. But if that is your stance, stop using them entirely. Giving them code is even worse.
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).
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
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.
You still need an email address…. which is functionally an account.
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
Specifically for the rate limit issue, a lot of nix’s derivations are hosted on GitHub and now and then the rate limit problem comes up when I rebuilds a dev environment.
Nixos.org is kind enough to host gigabytes of cache, but to get a ~40MiB tarball, we need to beg at the door of M$. Path dependency is really a trap.
Yeah, nix is utterly dependent on github and there have been many discussions about it. The majority of the community is very against migrating and refuses investing in anything else.
I remember a project abused github as their CDN, and github shut that down. Can’t remember the name but it was something plant-related (the name). Pods or something. If nix ever scales up massively, github just might rate limit the repo.
I used codeberg and liked it. This is a good reminder to try to stick with it moving forward
I use Codeberg and even paid to be a member, because it goes directly to support the development of forgejo.
I’m really looking forward to Forgejo federation
sounds awesome
I don’t know if they need more funding or contributors or something, but that has been on the roadmap for years now. I think all they can federate now are stars.
But I do hope that it’ll arrive soon. Github needs a federated alternative and gitlab isn’t going to give it to us. Radicle already has federation, but only within its network, so not exactly optimal.
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’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.
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.
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.
There’s a comparison here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
nice
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?
Enshittification is everywhere.
The fundamental flaw of autonomous, individualistic organizing is that it puts a ton of weight on a handful of people.
As soon as a corporate entity sweeps in and offers a huge payout in exchange for less work, the temptation to sell out becomes severe.
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.
Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.
Fucking… Goddammit Gitlab!
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.
VSCode runs on the web and has IDE-grade search functionality
I literally just need dumb search. No regex, no nothing, but just for that you now need an account. Especially on mobile, I’m not going to clone every repo I come across. It’s a hassle already.
If I really do care and dependent on the repo, I’ll clone it. Otherwise I just drop it most of the time or use a third party service. But ever since Microsoft bought github, it’s been really annoying.
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.
