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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 20 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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[-] mrkite@programming.dev 6 points 20 hours ago

Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.

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[-] blind3rdeye@lemm.ee 18 points 1 day 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.

[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day 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 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 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.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[-] fxomt@lemm.ee 145 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 60 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 42 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.

[-] 0x0@programming.dev 17 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] kabi@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago

I am seeing a LOT of the emulation crowd over at codeberg and other type of sites. Its gaining some popularity which is nice.

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[-] TimLovesTech@badatbeing.social 34 points 1 day ago

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

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[-] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 23 hours ago
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[-] communism@lemmy.ml 67 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

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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.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

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

[-] flubba86@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago

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

[-] ulterno@programming.dev 16 points 1 day ago

without these unnecessary roadblocks

But then how will they harvest your data?

[-] eronth@lemmy.world 0 points 15 hours 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".

[-] qaz@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)
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[-] Thorry84@feddit.nl 20 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.

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.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 32 points 1 day ago

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!
[-] melezhik@programming.dev 3 points 13 hours ago

Let me generalize that - yaml pipelines are terrible 😀

[-] svtdragon@lemmy.world 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

As the primary author of my previous org's GHAs (not GH Enterprise, just the team tier) I found some feature gaps compared to org[n-2]'s Jenkins but they were fairly quickly filled.

I was initially skeptical but it wasn't more than a month or two before I was just glad to be off Jenkins. And now that I'm back to a big org with a big Jenkins footprint, I really miss GHA.

Having everything be contextual in the same place is a huge value add for me.

[-] sirdorius@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 11 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] calcopiritus@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

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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[-] tyler@programming.dev 18 points 1 day ago

Complaining about needing an account to contribute is wild to me.

[-] mox@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 day ago

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.

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[-] UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

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

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[-] oce@jlai.lu 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

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[-] robinshen@programming.dev 6 points 1 day 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).

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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2025
419 points (94.9% liked)

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