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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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.

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[-] eronth@lemmy.world 1 points 58 minutes ago

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".

[-] mrkite@programming.dev 4 points 6 hours ago

Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 0 points 6 hours ago

Fucking.... Goddammit Gitlab!

[-] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 15 points 15 hours ago

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.

[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 hours ago
[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev -1 points 7 hours ago
[-] Sickday@kbin.earth 3 points 6 hours ago

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.

[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 29 points 20 hours ago

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.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 0 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

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.

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[-] ulterno@programming.dev 16 points 19 hours ago

without these unnecessary roadblocks

But then how will they harvest your data?

[-] fxomt@lemm.ee 140 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] kabi@lemm.ee 57 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] fxomt@lemm.ee 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

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[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 33 points 1 day ago

They are on Codeberg, but it's only as a github mirror.

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[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 27 points 22 hours ago

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

[-] flubba86@lemmy.world 21 points 19 hours ago

I use Codeberg and even paid to be a member, because it goes directly to support the development of forgejo.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 66 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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).

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day 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

[-] mac@lemm.ee 2 points 16 hours ago

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

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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.

[-] Thorry84@feddit.nl 19 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] StrikeForceZero@programming.dev 8 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] qaz@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 7 hours ago

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.

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[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 5 points 18 hours ago

It'd be cool to use one service to upload to everything simultaneously.

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 0 points 8 hours ago

What do you mean? Github has remotes and you can push to all of them at once. Or dk mean something else?

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[-] eronth@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

Presumably they mean on the PC side. Like a tool where git push can push to multiple repos, keeping it safe everywhere. I presume you'd have to pick some sort of pull priority order or something, and balancing changes pushed to different repo hosts could be a chore.

[-] robinshen@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago

Want to mention that OneDev does support SSH clone. Only that SSH access to code.onedev.io is turned off (code.onedev.io is not a public hosting service, it is set up to develop OneDev itself).

[-] onlinepersona@programming.dev 0 points 8 hours ago

Oh, that's a pity. So there is no public instance? If not, I'll just remove it from the list. code.onedev.io is thus a dogfooding instance?

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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
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