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.

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
      0·
      29 days ago

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

  • yogsototh@programming.dev
    0·
    27 days ago

    I selfhost using forgejo (the same project codeberg is using) and I only clone on github.

    This should be a good first step to decentralize.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    0·
    29 days ago

    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.

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    I hate that they started taking down emulation repos more and more. They have a majority and heavy visibility for companies.

  • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    27 days ago

    For a small project I recently switched to fossil from git. It’s also distributed version control, but includes a bug tracker, wiki, and other stuff as well. It’s minimalist, but hosting yourself is super easy.

    Default git over ssh is often enough as well. Combine with any bug tracker and CI you like. You don’t need to use an all in one tool like GitHub.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    29 days 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!
      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        It’s an interesting idea - but I’ve not been able to get it to work. Some of that is due to us using “GitHub Enterprise” which is somehow MUCH worse than the normal hosted GitHub - but we get to pay more for it! I haven’t tried it with “normal” github.com actions yet - does it deal well with shared workflows and custom builders?

        • thesmokingman@programming.dev
          0·
          29 days ago

          It does with some hoops IIRC. I used act a couple of years ago to test a very distributed flow for enterprise IaC projects. I can’t remember all of the things we had to do and I think I’m conflating some of the podman issues we had on macOS with act issues. AWS credentials were an annoyance, I think, but we worked around it with some community code. Our primary purpose for act was to be the local testing for enterprise action deployment so I’d guess it’s close to yours. I think our conclusion was to distribute the actions to each repo rather than use the central .github repo for actions because of how GitHub handles overrides. My memory is really fuzzy.

          If you’re going to believe this internet stranger, start with a very simple set of demos to vet me. I remember being very happy; I do not remember how the team solved it. M

          • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            29 days ago

            As with all things GH Actions related - “it kinda works if you struggle with it for a while”. If I get some spare time I may tinker with it a bit then - knowing things are “possible” is a good start. ;-)

            It’s my biggest complaint with GH Actions - death by a thousand paper-cuts. It’s not that it does any one thing wrong (though the way “shared workflows” work is pretty abysmal) it’s that everything hurts a little to work with. At least if you’re not building an open source project freely shared on github.com and using all public actions.

            • thesmokingman@programming.dev
              0·
              29 days ago

              Totally agree. I’m glad you read between the lines there. It’s out there if you have the resources to throw at it.

              Like most DevOps things, it’s all about the opinionated ecosystem you hop in. It has most things and does most of the stuff you want until you decide to adapt the pattern to your use case and holy fucking shit is it hard to adapt opinionated ecosystems. That’s why I continue to have jobs.

        • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          29 days ago

          I know because of security, people jumped off circleci but their local tool was amazing in what it did. No messing around, it worked just like their own platform. Being able to ssh into the box that was failing was a great feeling. Sometimes you just have to get into the box in order to see what is going wrong, and they allowed that.

          Ive had to fight act quite a bit to get the same functionality. Things would go to GH Actions only to do something slightly different and I would have to make a fix. Over time, it gets tiring. Ive worked with CI/CD platforms for over a decade and Actions are…ok. Still feels beta in how much is reliant upon the community which drops scripts from time to time.

            • slowcakes@programming.dev
              0·
              29 days ago

              We recently migrated our code base to GH and from Jenkins to GH actions. And I can’t say that it’s any better, just more confusing. Shit was much more simpler on bitbucket server with Jenkins. Never realized GitHub was slow until today, loading pages takes like a second.

              My favorite code repository in terms of layout (not functionality) is still gitblit. Looks simpel and easy to read the commit log because that is the first you are shown when navigating in a repository, no PR support though.

    • svtdragon@lemmy.world
      0·
      28 days 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
      0·
      29 days 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.

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      Whenever I need to fix something with them, I go onto a separate branch, write a sane commit message once and suffix it with a “1”. Then the next time, I just grab the same git commit command from my history and change the “1” to a “2”, then to a “3” etc…

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        29 days ago

        I’m sure you can just --amend it and push with --force-with-lease (safer than just --force). That’ll prevent the 78343 commits.

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    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.

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    0·
    29 days 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).

    • Deckweiss@lemmy.world
      0·
      29 days ago

      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.

    • mac@lemm.ee
      0·
      29 days 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

    • kautau@lemmy.world
      0·
      29 days 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

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      The fundamental flaw of autonomous, individualistic organizing is that it puts a ton of weight on a handful of people.

      As soon as a corporate entity sweeps in and offers a huge payout in exchange for less work, the temptation to sell out becomes severe.

  • 0x0@programming.dev
    0·
    29 days ago

    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?

  • sirdorius@programming.dev
    0·
    29 days ago

    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.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
      0·
      29 days ago

      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.

  • Kissaki@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    Account requirements seem like a worthwhile safeguard against spam.

    Projects can still use and accept emails or whatever outside of GitHub.

  • lobut@lemmy.ca
    0·
    29 days ago

    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.