Just to nitpick, requiring a free account is substantially different from a paywall.
Agreed, changed paywall to a login wall instead.
Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps https://tangled.sh/ or a https://forgejo.org/ instance is an option?
The question is rather whether GitHub is no longer an option, or will stop being one soon.
One should always assume a vendor could vanish at any time, or your access to your data at the vendor. To assume this is a cheap mitigation against potential sadness.
At a minimum, you should be keeping hot copies of all contents of your repos currently hosted at Github, code, issues, etc. This could be in another svn system, or archive blobs in object storage you have full control over and can hydrate as needed into operating svn systems.
(risk management is my day gig)
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#13Advanced Search doesn't work unless you're logged in, but it's been like that for at least a year.
It’s been like that since very beginning.
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#14I believe so. I cannot view any repository from my phone. It asks me to log in first.
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#15With AI and all the new projects/forks/updates, github is one busy place.
I wasn't browsing /trending on github until I started using AI, wanting to see what cool projects people are working on.
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#16Fine for my closed source stuff, but my open source work is specifically meant to be viewable, even by non-technical people doing recruitment or looking over my portfolio.
I've put up with a lot of stuff, but this would be my personal last straw.
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#17that is github.com you are referring to, would pulling public repos the curl -fsSL way need to be authenticated?
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#18I think this would push even more small to medium sized busineses towards self hosting which I would love to see
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#19I think it’s been functionally login-only for a while, unfortunately.
Any time I try to use the site while logged out I immediately hit all sorts of rate limits and spam prevention measures. Issues and pull requests stop loading almost immediately. Searches are extremely restricted, like i think literally one search is all you get sometimes unless you login.
It’s hard to tell how much of this is intentional and how much is GitHub infra not being stable. My daily renovate bot that looks for updates for specific packages times out and encounters errors almost every time it runs and it’s barely doing anything. And it has an api key. I know I’m not hitting limits, some queries just don’t work >50% of the time on some repos.
Sometimes I see there are 200 issues, I click the issues tab, and there are zero. Is GitHub down? Am I rate limited? Do I just need to login? Or I know an issue/PR exists, and it just doesn’t appear when I search for the title or keywords verbatim. I just manually bookmark or subscribe to any important issue or PR now because the UI can’t be trusted anymore.
Re: Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?
#20AI ruined everything. They have to protect "their" code.