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.
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.
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.
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.
Gitlab probably isn’t much better these days but at least it’s open sauce. Until I build a forgejo instance it’s gitlab for me.
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.
I would be pretty interested in reading a more robust analysis between the alternatives you list and GitHub itself. Going to each one and giving them a glance really doesn’t show me much other than “yup, it’s similar to GitHub”.
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 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).
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
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
rip gitorious
Who?
First result of a search:
Gitorious was a free and open source web application for hosting collaborative free and open-source software development projects using Git revision control. Although it was freely available to be downloaded and installed, it was written primarily as the basis for the Gitorious shared web hosting service at gitorious.org, until it was acquired by GitLab in 2015.
Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.
Fucking… Goddammit Gitlab!
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.
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.
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.
I feel some sadness in seeing Microsoft’s slow sludge of enshitification oozing forward and gradually engulfing github. There’s still a way to go before it become totally crap, but it is definitely getting worse and will continue to get worse as Microsoft does their best to mine whatever value they can from everyone passing by.
Knowing this, I think it is wise to start looking at alternatives.
It’d be cool to use one service to upload to everything simultaneously.
What do you mean? Github has remotes and you can push to all of them at once. Or dk mean something else?
I’m really looking forward to Forgejo federation
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.
sounds awesome
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.