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Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub
- superkuh 3y agoEveryone centralizing in Github is very, very unhealthy and fragile.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SirMaster 3y agoLet me guess, we need a fediverse solution or source code now?
- throwup238 3y agoWeb 3.0 for code. Not your keys, not your repo!
- shadowgovt 3y agoMaybe not, but this is a decent time to remind everyone to local-cache all your dependencies.
- ForHackernews 3y agoGit is already a distributed VCS. Just host someplace other than Github, honestly.
- jenadine 3y agoPutting the source somewhere else: easy, git push and change the URL in your doc. Moving all the issues: hopefully someone must have done a script to fetch the issue and convert them. Moving your CI: just rewrite your GitHub action away from these horrible yaml command. This is just going to be a bit more expensive than the 100% free GitHub plan. Getting the community of millions of user that can report issues, propose PR and star your repository. Good luck with that. The network effect of the community is the barrier to the change. Unless you do proprietary software, then you don't care.
- ForHackernews 3y ago> Getting the community of millions of user that can report issues, propose PR and star your repository. Good luck with that. Oh my stars! The network effect of "the community" is the worst part of Github. Your life and your project will be much better without whiny entitled people spamming the same issues expecting free support, and endless "i got an error" bug reports.
- AvieDeckard 3y agoGit is already decentralized. So no, we don't need a fediverse equivalent. Crazy idea, but what if you hosted your code on your infrastructure, like the "old days"? Or, move to an independent forge, or stay where you are. The concern isn't about GitHub directly, but that everyone storing all their source code in one place is concerning. Git is flexible. I'm kind of surprised at how ubiquitous GitHub is given how easy it is to host your own repositories and set up a mailing list to accept patches and discussion on.
- BadHumans 3y agoSelf hosting is painful and not a real solution for most people. Mailing list also have terrible UX. I'd rather risk Github nuking all of my 50 or so repos than work over a mailing list.
- throwaway894345 3y agoAs much as I love doing things myself, the reality is that I spend wayyyy more time doing things myself than I save, and time is my main constraint. Getting booted off of GitHub would be a pretty minor inconvenience compared to the time sink of doing it myself, especially if I botch something and lose data. > Git is flexible. I'm kind of surprised at how ubiquitous GitHub is given how easy it is to host your own repositories and set up a mailing list to accept patches and discussion on. The UX you're proposing is far worse than what GitHub provides for less effort, and anyway GitHub isn't just "repo hosting + code review", you also get web hooks, CI, user/org management, code search (such as it is), a web interface (as well as mobile app), etc. And you don't have to teach people how to use it effectively.
- samatman 3y agoIt exists: https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz, but it doesn't really get used. I think gittorrent was the right name for the concept, really, hard to beat that. But that one withered on the vine: https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
- sterlind 3y agoI can't tell if you're being ironic, but Git is already federated. Like, GitHub should be just another remote, and which remote happens to be the source of truth is a policy decision. The sticky part are the value-add, non-Git parts like GitHub actions, the issue tracker, wiki, static hosting, access management etc. But most of those are orthogonal and federating them (perhaps as git repos themselves) seems like a good idea. (disclaimer: work for MS, not on GitHub, also hi again superkuh)
- ilaksh 3y agoThere have been at least a few truly decentralized efforts along the lines of GitHub. There is almost no interest. I also feel that just going with one or two other companies is better than exactly one monopoly but we can do much better. For some reason if I say p2p on HN it's not appreciated.
- Kluggy 3y agoThe issue is more that p2p is always touted as the solution and yet there's been almost zero actually useful solutions developed. There's some fundamental issues preventing the decentralized network to be a generic solution and until that's sorted out, it doesn't seem to add to a conversation to bring up p2p as a solution.
- whatshisface 3y agoThe issues clearly aren't fundamental enough to stop software pirates or the Onion network.
- ilaksh 3y agoThere are multiple useful solutions. They are just ignored. Notice you didn't mention any fundamental issue specifically.
- bee_rider 3y agoGit seems to work pretty well p2p without the hub.
- arealaccount 3y agoI get losing your PRs and comments, and pipelines. But if you get banned from Github, can't you just pick different remote and keep rolling? If it's about the PRs and comments, and pipelines, then those are features specific to Github so where is the fault for acting unhealthy?
- treyd 3y agoIf this happens randomly to a small-medium size foss project that doesn't have strong attention from GitHub the corporation it could be catastrophic.
- mckn1ght 3y agoIssue/discussion portability is much harder than code/history portability, I think is a deeper issue.
- karaterobot 3y ago> But if you get banned from Github, can't you just pick different remote and keep rolling? If you have a local copy. I imagine that if you have 1800+ repositories on Github, there'd be at least a few you probably didn't have installed anymore, because you knew you could always get them back from Github.
- ibejoeb 3y agoPRs are useful, and so is the discussion system. These things are at par with other platforms that are pretty much equally barrier-free. Any of the workflow automation stuff might be more difficult to replace, but I haven't had an especially good experience with it anyway. I don't know about everyone else, but it's been pretty unreliable and fragile. Even the Azure integration, which ought to be first-class, is pretty opaque. I really wanted to lean into that stuff, but for now, I'm happy running my own.
- samatman 3y agoTo be fair, this is an inevitable consequence of using distributed revision control.
- wg0 3y agoScary to think about that.
- beanjuiceII 3y agocalm down its already back
- rcoveson 3y agoIf it happens to you: 1. Remain calm 2. Tweet at your 66k followers 3. Briefly wait while the dozens of those that work at GitHub trip over each other getting your account reactivated
- klipklop 3y agoSure but somebody with no pull like him has a very low chance of getting their account back.
- whatshisface 3y agoThe way it got banned represents something that could happen to any one of us - getting seen by an MS employee on the front page of HN is something that can only happen to Chris Wanstrath. Moving off github is a good idea anyway, since they took away source code search for non-signed-in-users. I experience that annoyance every time I need to find the source of an error string in someone's github project.
- meowface 3y ago>Moving off github is a good idea anyway, since they took away source code search for non-signed-in-users. I experience that annoyance every time I need to find the source of an error string in someone's github project. It could be done in part for cynical registration metrics reasons, but I'm guessing search is probably costly and this helps reduce automated activity. I also imagine they might face issues with bots searching for certain patterns to identify vulnerabilities and leaked credentials. Why is it unacceptable for you to register an account to make your debugging process easier?
- antonvs 3y agoEasy solution to this: don’t use github for primary repositories.
- whatshisface 3y agoThe problem with unilateral solutions to social networks undergoing management decay is that everyone else is still on them.
- simonw 3y agoThis is one of my nightmares... I have 800+ repos on GitHub and I dread the thought of some weird machine learning algorithm somewhere deciding that my account should be banned. A lot of the stuff I care about on there is backed up elsewhere, but not everything. I even have a tool for this: https://datasette.io/tools/github-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/github-to-sqlite - which exports issues, issue comments etc to a SQLite database via the GitHub API. I do at least trust GitHub not to delete everything, but to instead put my account in some kind of soft-deleted state - and I'm reasonably confident I could get it reinstated via my network. But still, scary. Why do I have everything on GitHub? Because I genuinely do trust them - they have a 15+ year track record of NOT breaking, and I know that my repos are backed up to three different continents automatically.
- smivan 3y agoI have the same nightmare, so to mitigate risk I run a self hosted instance of Gitea [1] and set up nightly mirroring. The folder with the mirrors is then uploaded to a backup provider, in my case Borgbase [2] 1. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea 2. https://www.borgbase.com/ https://www.borgbase.com/
- flowck 3y agoI stopped reading at "I have 800+ repos on GitHub". DUDE, it's time to back up your account to some other service. Anything can happen.
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- calrain 3y agoThis is why I never use any OAuth/SAML authentication from places like Google, Microsoft, or Facebook when registering with a site. Always use email address and password (with 2FA where possible) to ensure you have ultimate control over your base account. If Google chose to just ban my account, the downstream ramifications of me losing access to linked sites that use that account for auth would be very damaging.
- piotrkaminski 3y agoWouldn't any sane SSO implementation let you recover and switch to a password simply by proving ownership of the email address via a challenge email?
- sauwan 3y ago>If Google chose to just ban my account
- piotrkaminski 3y agoThis assumes you're using a consumer Gmail account, I guess? If so, yeah, you're SOL. But I think as long as you have your owns domain you should be fine, even if you hook it up to Google Workspace for email, since you can always switch it to another provider. (And yeah, I realize this is not something civilians are likely to be able to figure out / do...)
- yawaramin 3y agoFor the people who know how to do that, they are just not going to use SSO in the first place. They will just use email+password+OTP.
- piotrkaminski 3y agoNot necessarily. Speaking for myself, I like the convenience of SSO, and I generally trust Google to keep my account secured more than a random web site (if they even offer OTP!). As long as I know there's an escape hatch.
- Ameo 3y agoThis was a good reminder for me to request an export of my Github account. I have no intention of leaving and don't expect any issues myself, but it made me realize I have a lot of stuff there that I don't have local backups of anymore.
- segphault 3y agoI really wish gitea offered a paid plan for individual users so that there was a good alternative to Github available for personal private git hosting without having to self host.
- andrewstuart 3y agoHere's a term you need to start saying to management of your company: "software supply chain risk". github just became a business risk and a software supply chain risk. I recently worked for a very large company that was 100% all in on github. And now its clear that in an instant and single developer or perhaps the entire organisation can be finished as far as github goes. Any CTO would now be negligent to have an organisational dependency/risk on github. The future has to be companies getting out of the cloud, getting out of vendors who can inflict major business damage in an instant with no recourse on the basis of entirely unknowable decisions.
- FooBarWidget 3y agoOkay but usually businesses deal with this not by having no dependencies and doing everything themselves. Instead they establish business relationships that ensure they do have a recourse, such as through contractual obligations. Likewise, if the concern is that Github automatically bans you without a recourse, then my preferred solution is that they do introduce recourse. This could even be a paid option: I think it's entirely reasonable for them to ask an administration fee for the appeal process, just to cover the costs of having a human look at what's going on and providing a good explanation.
- icywolfy2 3y agoUse GitHub for Enterprise and self-host, like most modern companies.
- Xeamek 3y agoThe automatization of moderation is legitimately one of the scariest problems with modern internet, but because it's abuse and mistakes inherently affect tiny minority, nobody cares. And obviously companies will fallback to automated tools rather then pay for human reviewers. I don't really know how this should be dealt with. ...or maybe it shouldn't. And we should just accept that random minority will have their livelihoods destroyed. After all, it wouldn't be the first time when society disregarded injustice of few for the convenience of the many
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago"Automation" also is a good way of hiding manual human moderation that is done for reasons beyond those they're willing to admit to publicly.
- aiw1nt3rs 3y agomaybe stop wasting your time hoping from one centralized provider to the next one? radicle.xyz is the only p2p alternative that exists and it's neat. give it a try.
- petercooper 3y agoJudging by some of the reactions on this thread, GitHub would do well to make an official post explaining the situation, as well as the processes and mitigations in place for users affected by such suspensions. Regardless of the technicalities behind making backups or the decentralized nature of git, GitHub is a trusted service and needs to maintain that trust.
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoThe tech industry has a very strong belief that if they have to explain anything they do with rule enforcement, it will permit bad people to manipulate the process to avoid being punished for being bad people (as defined by the tech industry). The solution is to put everyone in constant fear of somehow angering something in a tech company (human or algorithm) so they'll reduce themselves down to a very narrow set of behaviors that probably won't (but aren't guaranteed not to) upset the enforcers (human or algorithm) of secret rules. Don't like it? Go build your own tech industry.
- cloudhead 3y agoWe'll hopefully have a real alternative to these centralized platforms when Radicle[0] gets closer to core feature parity with GitHub. For many, this will be sometime this year, for others it might take another year or two. It's really scary to have a single platform be able to take away what is essentially your portfolio, resume, social profile, webhost (github pages) and collaboration platform all in one go, with no explanation or recourse available. It shouldn't be that way. We're inching towards a Radicle v1.0 release that will provide some stability and a basic feature-set for hosting and collaboration in a fully "sovereign" way. If you're interested in helping out or learning more, feel free to drop me an email: cloudhead@radicle.xyz or come by our Zulip[1]. [0]: https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz [1]: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/ https://radicle.zulipchat.com/
- yawaramin 3y agoNote that defunkt's GH profile is still viewable. All the repos are still there. So the portfolio didn't go anywhere.
- tonfreed 3y agoOne of the reasons I have my own gitea box now
- wg0 3y agoI think EU should put legislation hammer here. That - you can't ban an account unless providing clear, direct and irrefutable evidence of serious nature such as pornography, hate speech or terrorism etc. This should be applicable to every online service provider.
- kragen 3y agothis is stunning does anyone have a public mirror of the tweets?