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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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.
I really don’t understand it.
It is 5 minutes to create an account and you can even use the same SSH key everywhere technically.
Then just put a bit config per website and it literally requires nearly 0 additional work ever. You can commit to all the different places practically simultaneously.
I guess you have to go to different websites for issues and I don’t know if codeberg specifically has CI/CD tools, but I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
Herd mentality, it affects devs too.
the actual problem is not that you need an additional account, but as OP said, the terms. with an account they can tie all your searches, what repos have you visited and how often, and other non-public activities to you. basically the same data mining that youtube, facebook and others do, just in an earlier stage
Pushing commits is just one of many concerns.
Do you want to suggest synchronizing issue tickets as well?
I am not talking about federated git repos. You are right, that is a huge undertaking with many issues to overcome.
I am simply talking about dev’s willingness to work only within X Y or Z website’s ecosystem even if another project they want to contribute to exists on another ecosystem (for example KiCAD which exists on their own gitlab instance and needs a separate account or gadgetbridge on Codeberg). It is enough to stop many people from contributing.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
They have a donate button. 🙂
Yeah, figuring to go member, it’s only 24€ a year (FYI 12€ if you can’t shell out that sum) and this is one of the first projects that I’d really like to see take off.
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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.
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.
without these unnecessary roadblocks
But then how will they harvest your data?
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.
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.
Don’t worry, their CI is pure garbage.
Which service has better CI? Genuine question
Gitlab CI is so far ahead of github actions… The only thing it doesn’t have is a marketplace, but otherwise it’s superior in nearly every aspect.
Thanks for that. I have somehow never used Gitlab myself but I have wondered if CI is always so annoying. GitHub actions are powerful imo, however their documentation is trash and there are many annoyances involved with using them. Typically if I think setting up a new GHA will take an hour, it ends up taking me a day to figure out. Slow, confusing, and poorly designed version of something that could be great. Maybe someday I’ll get to use Gitlab…
They both use YAML, but I find the Gitlab doc to be better. If you don’t want YAML, you can try Dagger.IO which forces you to write code and can be run in any CI. Haven’t used it yet though as it requires a change in thinking that I haven’t managed yet.
selfhosted forgejo, but you have to host it :/
you can use self hosted runners from GitHub though
It’s not the self-hosting part that sucks about github actions 😉
That’s not very nice.
To garbage.
I mean, at least in a pinch you can burn some garbage to stay warm. Its going to suck but not as much as actions.
Complaining about needing an account to contribute is wild to me.
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
You’re not okay with anonymous malicious prs? How prude! /s
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$. Path dependency is really a trap.
Yeah, nix is utterly dependent on github and there have been many discussions about it. The majority of the community is very against migrating and refuses investing in anything else.
I remember a project abused github as their CDN, and github shut that down. Can’t remember the name but it was something plant-related (the name). Pods or something. If nix ever scales up massively, github just might rate limit the repo.
Want to mention that OneDev does support SSH clone. Only that SSH access to code.onedev.io is turned off (code.onedev.io is not a public hosting service, it is set up to develop OneDev itself).
Oh, that’s a pity. So there is no public instance? If not, I’ll just remove it from the list. code.onedev.io is thus a dogfooding instance?
It was easy enough to introduce Git with a self hosted Gitea at my work place 4 years ago. I see Codeberg is based on a fork of Gitea called Forgejo, so I guess it is also good.
It’s basically the same even the same plugins mostly work. I believe the biggest changes are on time to market (PRS are quicker but more experimental). And they are doing heavy work on federation.
There’s a comparison here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
nice
They forked gitea when the gitea devs created an Ltd to help fund development of the platform. I also remember some noise around the same time when gitea took an extra day to release a security patch.
They’ve got about half of the activity of gitea which is pretty impressive considering they’re entirely off github, even if they have 1/4 of the contributors in the same time (9 vs 38)
I hate that they started taking down emulation repos more and more. They have a majority and heavy visibility for companies.
That’s M$ doing their EEE-dance as usual. Actions is pretty egregious, my company’s decided that All must be in the cloud™, even CI/CD, so Actions it is… Soon enough, bit by bit, a lot will depend on GitHub’s functionality and there you have it, full circle, it’ll be a pain to move elsewhere. Or do you still think all GitHub is is a git front-end?
well codeberg’s CI system is almost a copy of github actions, so there’s that
But people said it wasn’t a big deal if microsoft bought it all up!!?
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.
