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.

  • onlinepersona@programming.devOPEnglish
    54·
    2 days ago

    nobody is really dependent on Github

    If that were true, moving away from github would be ezpz.

    The features like searching might not be optimal

    Requiring an account to find a project = not optimal is an understatement, IMO.

    I’m also just a little guy who does scripting and small CLI tools. So it does not matter at all what I do

    That sounds an awful lot like a fallacy. If you wait longer, then when something does drive you to say “I should switch”, you’ll run into the sunken cost issue. If you think you’re unimportant, that’s great for github because they have thousands of people that think they are unimportant but it adds up. You could be part of the solution, no matter how small.

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Traister101@lemmy.today
      3·
      2 days ago

      Github outside of hosting the actual git repo largly just provides good routes for collaboration, namely issues, their PR system and some convenient rules on who is allowed to mess with branches and how (IE you can set master to only accept merges done via github themselves). CI is the real lock in far as your git repo is concerned cause that just won’t work at all on another host

      • Gamma@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Gitea and forgejo have gh compatible actions, thank god. GitLab’s ci was awful from my experience

    • chebra@mstdn.io
      2·
      2 days ago

      I’m right now in the process of creating accounts to publish a VSCode extension. But the choices are either Microsoft (marketplace) or Open-vsx.org which requires github account which is also Microsoft, so … Eclipse foundation is acting totally anti-open-source it seems.