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Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

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Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the "it's not a monopoly" crowd and yes we should definitely use other words to describe companies that do not have exclusive control over a commercial activity.

Exclusive control of an activity isn't needed to be a monopoly. In the 90s, people used Netscape on Macs, but Microsoft got declared a monopoly anyway.

First I don't think your Netscape on Mac argument holds up. The antitrust suit was about IE on Windows.

"[...] the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the PC market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java." [0]

"The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE." [0]

I do agree that exclusive control may not be needed. However, Microsoft was engaging in other anti-competitive behavior. It's not like they're restricting Windows users to only use GitHub.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#252

It’s worth noting that the OP has recently acquired a 2-letter username from someone else & blogged about it: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... I imagine there’s more to this than disclosed.

Might be this. https://dev.to/mscccc/hi-im-mike-coutermarsh

See the comment. This intro post was old but OP’s comment was recent. That guy is a Github Staff. I am not sure though.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you should be first asking how easy is it to get free support from GitLab.

For GitLab.com maybe that’s a question, but nobody is going to ban me from my self-hosted service.

Don't mean to sound facetious, but isn't self hosting also technically hosting somewhere ? (Unless you mean actually having access to the physical server where it's running from)

In other words are we just assuming Digital Ocean/Hetzner or wherever one 'self-hosts' is less likely to auto ban you for no reason? I would say yes, but I hope others are atleast considering this aspect when comparing this moving to Gitlab or whatever

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you self host your repository, your hosting provider can pull the plug and you essentially end up in square one. Yeah, but it's much, much, much less likely than some script at GitHub getting triggered and shutting your account down. And even the cheap hosting providers do have ultra-premium-platinum-support compared to Google, GitHub, Amazon etc.

> And even the cheap hosting providers do have ultra-premium-platinum-support It is an odd thing to think that GoDaddy may have more merit as a solution than Github for hosting code...

While GoDaddy doesn't have the best support, they have fixed many account related issues for my clients in the past.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#255
post #227

It’s worth noting that the OP has recently acquired a 2-letter username from someone else & blogged about it: https://dev.to/yg/how-i-got-two-letter-username-on-github-i1... I imagine there’s more to this than disclosed.

I read the article. What's fishy about this?

That article was posted 10 days ago, on a US public holiday. Seems likely the previous owner only recently reported an account "theft" enabled by github's own support team and name reuse policy. This is exactly why account name reuse is such a bad idea.

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#258
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a paid account this is utterly unacceptable. For a free account I can kinda understand it, although it'd still be nice to get some automated explanation. An automated system that can't provide a good reason to disable an account, shouldn't be disabling accounts at all. If this is a thing that happens at Github, I guess that's another reason to check out Gitlab instead.

And this sort of thing is why some of us have been endlessly warning that it's probably a bad idea to centralize all of the open-source ecosystem onto a single centralized, proprietary, commercial platform. Not that those warnings were heeded, of course, as usual.

This

Re: Ask HN: My GitHub account got suspended without any notice

#260

It is ridiculous that GitHub has not even responded to your support ticket. To anyone reading from GitHub, this is making me rethink my choice of GitHub as a platform, and I'm sure the same is true for other people reading this post. Your reputation is very much at stake. To anyone reading this from Gitlab, how easy is it to migrate CI/CD off of GitHub Actions to Gitlab?

To anyone at GitHub reading this, this thread has motivated me to move the rest of my projects to a self-hosted solution. Putting all my eggs in GitHub's basket is evidently too much risk for me to bear.

And you can still mirror to GH to benefit from the extra visibility and attention this is bringing to your project.
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