Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

Git 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.

samatman2• 2 years ago

It exists: 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

sterlind• 2 years ago

I 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)

ilaksh2• 2 years ago

There 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• 2 years ago

The 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.

throwaway8943452• 2 years ago

I was thinking about this recently. What does "truly decentralized" Github look like? In particular, I'm curious about decentralized code review and so on. Probably not technically difficult or mind-blowing, but I'm curious nevertheless.

meowface2• 2 years ago

Centralization is just too convenient for most people. Most people - technical or otherwise - won't accept the slightest quality-of-life (edit: and network size/activity) hit in exchange for the greater robustness of decentralized options, regardless of the application.

Note how the vast majority of people who use or interact with cryptocurrencies converge around a few centralized options. Even a ton of the technical people who develop cryptocurrency-related systems do.

Lyngbakr• 2 years ago

While not a perfect solution, I think organisations like Codeberg§ are a step in the right direction.

§ https://codeberg.org/

arealaccount• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

If 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• 2 years ago

Issue/discussion portability is much harder than code/history portability, I think is a deeper issue.

karaterobot• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

PRs 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.

samatman2• 2 years ago

To be fair, this is an inevitable consequence of using distributed revision control.

beanjuiceII• 2 years ago

calm down its already back

klipklop• 2 years ago

Sure but somebody with no pull like him has a very low chance of getting their account back.

whatshisface5• 2 years ago

The 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.

meowface2• 2 years 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?

rcoveson• 2 years ago

If 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

imjonse• 2 years ago

you forgot

0. Cofound github

chrisjc• 2 years ago

Missed a step

1. Be co-founder and former CEO

2. Remain calm

3. Tweet at your 66k followers

4. Briefly wait while the dozens of those that work at GitHub trip over each other getting your account reactivated

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

Irrelevant. Makes no difference at all.

This incident alone means no company should have github as a mission critical component of their software development.

icywolfy22• 2 years ago

That's why companies self host GitHub for Enterprise.

I know of no reason why a company should use public GitHub for private business.

Every company I have contracted or worked for, all used on-prem GHE.

simonw• 2 years ago

This 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 - 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.

smivan2• 2 years ago

I 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 2. https://www.borgbase.com/

vinni2• 2 years ago

Does it also backup PRs ans issues and all the comments?

flowck• 2 years ago

I 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.

weikju• 2 years ago

You should’ve kept reading.

JohnFen4• 2 years ago

This is one of my nightmares... I have 800+ repos on GitHub

This is one of the reasons I don't use Github: I am deeply uncomfortable putting so much power over me in their (or most companies') hands.

Even if they're entirely trustworthy and reliable right now, any company is just an acquisition away from that no longer being the case.

yodon2• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure Microsoft getting acquired is a considerably lower probability event than the other risks you're mitigating. If not, you might want to assess your risk tolerance.

antonvs• 2 years ago

Easy solution to this: don’t use github for primary repositories.

whatshisface5• 2 years ago

The problem with unilateral solutions to social networks undergoing management decay is that everyone else is still on them.

Ameo• 2 years ago

This 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• 2 years ago

I 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.

smivan2• 2 years ago

They do: https://about.gitea.com/pricing/

brnt• 2 years ago

Codeberg takes donations last I checked.

calrain• 2 years ago

This 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.

piotrkaminski3• 2 years ago

Wouldn'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• 2 years ago

If Google chose to just ban my account

ummonk• 2 years ago

Depends whether they have an email-centric or SAML-account-centric auth model.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

Here'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• 2 years ago

Okay 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.

icywolfy22• 2 years ago

Use GitHub for Enterprise and self-host, like most modern companies.

Xeamek• 2 years ago

The 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_Skies2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

maybe 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• 2 years ago

Judging 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_Skies2• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

We'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

[1] https://radicle.zulipchat.com/

yawaramin2• 2 years ago

Note that defunkt's GH profile is still viewable. All the repos are still there. So the portfolio didn't go anywhere.

tonfreed• 2 years ago

One of the reasons I have my own gitea box now

wg02• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

this is stunning

does anyone have a public mirror of the tweets?

Chris Wanstrath "defunkt" GitHub cofounder and former CEO is banned on GitHub

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