Give Up GitHub - Software Freedom Conservancy

2 Likes

the alternatives are simply put quite bad imho.

Codeberg has a lot of downtime and seems to not really care about QoS and continuity.

Gitlab has their own controversies and a relatively bad security reputation.

The other alternatives are immature when it comes to UX.

Let alone that I would want to use GenAI as a developer, and gh copilot is really good. You would be wasting your time without it really and just be replaced by companies and people who do.

There can be set a lot about ethics and making the right settings etc and I think that that is relevant, but simply the: ā€˜avoid using itā€™ is no longer going to cut it.

6 Likes

Not everything owned by a big tech is worth leaving. What will a developer do on a platform where there is no other developer to collaborate? Github have millions of developers that you can connect and collaborate with, whoā€™s on codeberg or gitlab? Just a niche developers who care too much about foss? Like being on extreme side?

The organisation (SFC) you mentioned have accounts on X, Facebook and Youtube. I wonder what they are doing on those proprietary platforms. They can just stay on fediverse, as itā€™s open. Well because thereā€™s no one there lol. Same is the case with github and all these other platforms like codeberg and gitlab.

I love open source, and all but with all due respect, these alternatives are just bad and not upto the mark. Not Everything that is FOSS is better.

2 Likes

Exactly my sentiments!

Tor Project, FUTO, F-Droid, GNOME, etc. Wouldnā€™t call these projects or their developers ā€œniche.ā€

1 Like

How many internet users use Tor project, F-droid or Gnome? Probably 3% ? Does average user use it? Does average user care for this? Nope. These are ofcourse ā€œnicheā€ in vast digital world.

Is the average user properly educated when it comes to digital security, privacy, and freedom? No.

Do people who are properly educated on these things use something that Tor Project, GNOME, or F-Droid provide? Very likely.

2 Likes

@incrementor well, thats main problem withn GitHub: its so popular that most of well-known projects are there and some 90% of daily dev-qork happens there.

CB, SH are all too inmature to even be considered ready for serious work.
GL is all another story that I will not be explaining here for obvious reasons.

Im using Tor almost everyday.

they are far more niche than you think.

Then educate millions of developers on github to leave github then. I guess most developers are tech savvy and do know about alternatives like gitlab, bitbucket, codeberg etc.

Are they well educated? Most developers are: Yes. Do they care of alternatives like these ? No; cuz thereā€™s no need when a better product exists.

Point is that these alternatives are just extra hassle and alternatives for most people no matter how good their intentions are.

You can recommend Protonmail as an alternative to Gmail as proton is now popular, itā€™s private and best part is the proton users can interact with Gmail users.

I think privacy guides should insure that only those alternatives should be recommended that are on par or very equal to the mainstream option in any way.

Also Tor project, F-droid isnā€™t used by everyone (regularly) even in the niche privacy community.

Yes, these options are not as viable as we think to many mainstream options. Itā€™s not that they arenā€™t technically capable, itā€™s just all other factors (popularity included), makes these options unusable for vast majority of developers.

Im using Tor almost everyday.

More power to you brother. Itā€™s awesome that you are able to use tor regularly. I would encourage more users to use Tor if their threat model allows for it.

First of all, GitHub is a social network. Projects not hosted on GitHub automatically receive less attention. Interacting with most developers who choose GitHub will be difficult.

1 Like

But proton users cannot interact with mail.ru users: mail.ru ignores letter from proton (gmail has no such problem).

Exactly, and this guy @Lukas , shared an article and guess what, those people (writing articles) have an account on Facebook and Youtube. I wonder why that is. These people never understand that something may be more private but is useless (better word unviable), when considering for masses, when that service is not comparable with mainstream options.

1 Like

But proton users cannot interact with mail.ru users: mail.ru ignores letter from proton (gmail has no such problem).

I didnā€™t know about that. Thanks for educating me. This might be probably due to them not complying with the russian government. In such a case, a throwaway gmail account with PGP encryption using an email client would be way better. Still Email was/is never a secure way of communicating. Signal (hope this works in russia) are better.

But yeah thanks for telling me that it doesnā€™t work with mail.ru.

By default - no.

By censorship circumvention mode? I hope or with an VPN. There are other solutions like session, simplex chat etc as well.

This stopped working. Full functionality - only with VPN.

1 Like

also was banned.

As end users, how does where the code being hosted affect our security and privacy? I understand the sentiment as an author of code not wanting it to be ingested by AI without compensation, but Iā€™m not sure how this has huge impact for us. Other than screw M$.