3 ms·

Show HN: Contribute to GitHub Anonymously

5 points by livrasand 9mo ago

gitGost allows anonymous contributions to public GitHub repositories. It removes author info, email, timestamps, and opens PRs from a neutral bot. No accounts, OAuth, or tokens required. Built in Go, open source (AGPL-3.0), with abuse prevention via rate limits and validation. Feedback welcome.

zahlman 9mo ago
> gitGost strips identifying information from your commits and creates pull requests on your behalf. Can't you just set up a pseudonym and throwaway email in your local git config?
- livrasand 9mo ago
  That’s a fair question, and for some cases a pseudonym + throwaway email can be enough. The main difference is that git config only affects a small part of the metadata. Even with a pseudonym, GitHub still receives and exposes: - Commit timestamps and timezone - Correlation across repos and long-term activity - Client and workflow patterns - A persistent GitHub account (even if “throwaway”) gitGost operates server-side and normalizes everything before GitHub ever sees it. Commits are re-authored with sanitized metadata and PRs are opened from a neutral bot account, so there’s no persistent identity to correlate over time. The goal isn’t just pseudonymity, but reducing long-term traceability and cross-repo linkage, especially for people contributing in sensitive or hostile contexts. That said, if someone is comfortable with a pseudonym and doesn’t need stronger anonymity guarantees, local git config is simpler. gitGost is meant for the cases where that’s not enough. Appreciate the question.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
KomoD 9mo ago
It says it makes the PRs with gitghost-anonymous but it's gitgost-anonymous without a h. the typo seems to be everywhere. Also realistically speaking, no project is going to accept a PR (beyond the most basic typo fix) with no information at all. You can't provide any info in the PR, you can't discuss the PR with anyone, you can't change it. A throwaway account makes much more sense than this. Also if you are going to reply to me, please don't use AI, thanks
- livrasand 9mo ago
  Good catch on the typo; you're right. It should be gitgost-anonymous (without the "h"). It's my mistake, and I'll correct it in the documentation and examples. Thanks for letting me know. Regarding acceptance: I agree that many projects don't accept important collaboration requests without context or discussion. GitGost should allow adding a good contextual comment. And I think that will be resolved soon, depending on the issues.

5 points by livrasand 9mo ago

zahlman 9mo ago

> gitGost strips identifying information from your commits and creates pull requests on your behalf. Can't you just set up a pseudonym and throwaway email in your local git config?

livrasand 9mo ago
That’s a fair question, and for some cases a pseudonym + throwaway email can be enough. The main difference is that git config only affects a small part of the metadata. Even with a pseudonym, GitHub still receives and exposes: - Commit timestamps and timezone - Correlation across repos and long-term activity - Client and workflow patterns - A persistent GitHub account (even if “throwaway”) gitGost operates server-side and normalizes everything before GitHub ever sees it. Commits are re-authored with sanitized metadata and PRs are opened from a neutral bot account, so there’s no persistent identity to correlate over time. The goal isn’t just pseudonymity, but reducing long-term traceability and cross-repo linkage, especially for people contributing in sensitive or hostile contexts. That said, if someone is comfortable with a pseudonym and doesn’t need stronger anonymity guarantees, local git config is simpler. gitGost is meant for the cases where that’s not enough. Appreciate the question.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

KomoD 9mo ago

It says it makes the PRs with gitghost-anonymous but it's gitgost-anonymous without a h. the typo seems to be everywhere. Also realistically speaking, no project is going to accept a PR (beyond the most basic typo fix) with no information at all. You can't provide any info in the PR, you can't discuss the PR with anyone, you can't change it. A throwaway account makes much more sense than this. Also if you are going to reply to me, please don't use AI, thanks

livrasand 9mo ago
Good catch on the typo; you're right. It should be gitgost-anonymous (without the "h"). It's my mistake, and I'll correct it in the documentation and examples. Thanks for letting me know. Regarding acceptance: I agree that many projects don't accept important collaboration requests without context or discussion. GitGost should allow adding a good contextual comment. And I think that will be resolved soon, depending on the issues.