1y ago

is it just me or GitHub is turning into some sort of LinkedIn

Initially, LinkedIn was just another site where you could find jobs. It was simple to use, simple to connect with others; it even had some friendly groups with meaningful discussions.

And then it gained monopoly as the "sole" professional network where you could actually land a job. If you are not on LinkedIn now, you are quite invisible in the job market. Recruiters are concentrated there, even if they have to pay extremely high prices for premium accounts. The site is horrible now: a social network in disguise, toxic and boring influencers, and a lot of noise and bloated interface to explore.

When Google decided to close their code.google.com, GitHub filled a void. It was a simple site powered by git (not by svn or CVS), and most of the major open-source projects migrated there. The interface was simple, and everything was perfect. And then something changed.

GitHub UI started to bloat, all kinds of "features" nobody asked for were implemented, and then the site became a SaaS. Now Microsoft hosts the bulk of open-source projects the world has to offer. GitHub has become a monopoly. If you don't keep your code there, chances are people won't notice your side projects. This bothers me.

Rant over. I hate internet monopolies.

151 comments

“Show us your GitHub”
Sure, here it is
“Looks empty”
Ya, I code for work, it’s all in private repos or in Azure Devops.
“So you don’t contribute to open source in your free time?”
No, I spend free time with my family. Again, I code for work, why on earth would I also use my free time for extra coding
“Thanks for your time but…”
Nah thanks for yours, I don’t wanna work for a company that expects me to code for them for for 8 hours and then go and code for someone else for free for more hours. That’s not a healthy work life balance, dickhead.
Edit: well this blew up (in a small lemmy kinda way). To clarify, before I coded for a living I coded as a hobby. Since I now do it full time, I don’t have any itch to scratch, I get my fill 40 hours a week. I’d ONLY be contributing to keep my GitHub looking a certain way for recruiters that one year in five I’m jobseeking and that feels like a waste of time. In reality it’ll probably be dark green the week before I started interviewing when I updated my website and then nothing before that until the last time I was interviewing.
Also, I chose to have a family and that takes effort, time and precedence over hobbies for me. If you also made that choice and you can code full time, have a healthy relationship with your wife and kids and still find time to have hobby code projects, all power to you. I don’t have the energy to open the laptop back up and get into something by the time the kids are in bed and I’ve spent some time with the wife. I’m not staying up into the night so a recruiter can glance at a chart and judge me to be a good or bad dev by how green it is.
How do I improve my skills over time? Tbh if the company I’m working for doesn’t allow me to block out a couple of hours to half day a week for learning I’m at the wrong company. I read, follow along with tutorials, experiment and think about how what I’m learning could be applied to the product I work with. Then if an opportunity to apply it comes along, I take it and either fail fast or bring something new, of value to the table.
Yup, the chart still goes green with contributions to private company repos, but those contributions also ain’t from my personal GitHub account, they’re from the one linked to my work email and I imagine they’ll close that account pretty quickly when I leave. Idk how that works tho, I only worked in one team in my whole dev career that seriously uses GitHub as source control, and they’re being moved to ADO as we type. GitHub is the go to for FOSS, but I don’t work in FOSS, I work in enterprise software and there’s much better enterprise git providers than GitHub (imho, ymmv). You can even throw the question back “do you actually use github here? If so can you tell me what lead you to go with that instead of other source control providers?” or side step it “I don’t really use github but I’m experienced in Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server plus I’m fluent in git command line so I’ll be able to skill up in GitHub specifics pretty quickly if I need to”. Interviews are two way streets, I’m interviewing a company as much as they’re interviewing me, I have standards on where I’ll choose to work.
If you want a portfolio, I’ve got one, it’s on my website, the url of which is on my cv. Knock yourself out, sign up if you like, it’s public. I even updated it just for you last week.
Y’know why recruiters ask to see your github? Because they read in a book or a blog somewhere that that’s what they should ask when interviewing developers. 21 year old graduate developers looking for their first junior position, sure, maybe. That isn’t all devs tho.
- I'd love to see recruiters who recruit in their free time, or surgeons who perform surgery in their free time.
  
  ...or surgeons who perform surgery in their free time.
  I suspect surgeons doing surgery in their off hours wouldn't be just weird, but also very creepy.
  
  there are tons of developers and technical folks that still find it fun and enjoyable to work on personal projects.
  i mean, how else do you build new skills or gain familiarity without stuff you don’t use at work?
- Well, some people regard coding as a hobby...
  
  Sysadmining is a lifestyle
  
  But not expected, and they may have selfhosted repo at home.
  
  Yeah absolutely I quickly get bored playing a computer game or something, but I just love coding (in Rust obviously ^^), creating new things etc.
- I get where you come from. I don't code after work much, but if nobody did, there wouldn't be much OSS. As for that interviewer, he's a dickhead.
- Fintech is easy to deal with in this regard.
  "do you have code samples you can share?"
  "would you be happy if an employee interviewed elsewhere and used your codebase for work samples?"
- What they're asking for is a public portfolio.
  Obviously, you can't give them code that legally belongs to a past employer and they're not allowed to look to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.
  Especially if they do any reverse-engineering for interoperability, there must be zero suspicion that they were inspired by code they're not allowed to use.
  This is where open source contributions under permissive licenses come in.
  Something shown to work in a real project is also viewed better than out of context code snippets.
  When you're essentially saying you have nothing to show them, you're indistinguishable from someone who actually has nothing and is lying about their skills, so the onus is on the interviewers to vet you, which for various reasons may not be possible, so they'd rather just move on to someone with a clearly proven track record.
  
  Ok but the original point still stands. Coding outside of work and at work is poor work life balance. Even my own projects I do are to learn not solve an actual problem in the world with code.
  
  And a public portfolio is the CV that states "I worked for this company making thier products". They might ask for the specific products, but there's a chance some people never made public ones.
  Github is for college and thesis projects. That's what most people have on there.
  The correct answer to these recruiters is still not stated yet. When they say
  "Your github is empty"
  People should answer
  "I only produce code that actually makes money".
- you can show activity without showing the details of the activity. which is at least demonstrating you’re active.
  
  Like this?
  https://github.com/taichi/gontributions#examples

At least, there's Codeberg, run by a German nonprofit, who's challenging the monopoly. It is aimed exclusively for FOSS projects, private repositories are forbidden. They are running Forgejo as their bloat-free software forge server.
Now, I think every Web2 website must be operated by a nonprofit.
- From my PoV it's probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.
  Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).
- Overall codeberg has been pretty decent, it's where the Kbin project is located. There's been a few outages over the last few weeks but overall it's pretty good.
  
  Github has had some outages recently too. Codeberg's recent outage was particularly bad, but not serious.
  
  Yes, I also experienced some outages and thus delayed pushing (which made me re-think again of overusing git submodules).
  Nevertheless, I migrated my works from my server and Github to Codeberg recently.
- wasn't codeberg using gitea? not it says powered by forgejo
  
  Gitea was taken over by a for-profit company, Forgejo is a fork by the previous maintainers to continue it fully FOSS without any of the shenanigans. See also their FAQ.
  
  Forgejo is Codeberg's fork of Gitea.
  
  Forgejo is apparently a fork of Gitea.
- Codeberg has private repos
  
  Section 2.1.2 of Codeberg Terms of Service says:
  Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
  So it's not for proprietary projects anyway.

Github has always had being a job site be it's secondary feature.
Except that it has a slightly higher bar of entry to recruiters and recruitment bots spreading toxic positivity, and anyone asking for a job is able to prove (at least some of) their value by showing off their code and how they participate publically in other repos (if at all).

I see two points in your argument:
Everything becoming a social network
People working at tech companies have to justify their salary somehow and this is low hanging fruit for adding 'features' as all people feel some need for connection. Feeling that a place is alive with other people will motivate your more to engage with it, rather than say, your own Git hosted server. I don't mind the social features added to GitHub as long as they don't take the main stage, like it did in the LinkedIn transformation.
GitHub monopoly of open source
GitHub has for most of the time been the main place for open source. I don't see a monopoly as necessarily bad as long as it remains focused on some values other than profit. I would rather have one big Wikipedia than a shitload of small fractured Wikipedias. Can it become a problem going forward, like it did with Reddit? Definitely, but I am cautiously optimistic. And in the worst case, git is heavily decentralized by design so you're one git remote add && git push away from moving. Migrating issues would be a bit more of a hassle, but surely there are solutions. And CI is not easily portable, but not a huge amount of work to convert to other formats.
- Codeberg can automatically migrate code and issues from Github using a personal access token iirc.
  Github packages and especially CI/CD are the real vendor locking antifeatures. All of the actions and scripts that your app/company depends on to run are completely locked to github.
  
  Fwiw, gitea has compatible actions. Not sure how compatible, though.
  
  Doesn't Codeberg say it's mostly for FOSS? They say private repos are only allowed for really small things like note keeping, so it wouldn't be right to just move everything there from GitHub.
  
  I can run GitHub workflows directly on my machine with ACT, I'm sure you could run that on your own private CI if you needed too. It's not perfect, but if a lot of people started wanting to migrate I'm sure it could get better.

Has GitHub actually done anything negative? Your comments really just sound like fear mongering, I can't see any actual issues.
What is the bloat you're referring to? The UI is clean and simple. Navigating and searching code is intuitive. The issue tracker is basic but reliable. Releases are clear. GitHub Actions are complex but featureful and incredibly useful. GitHub Packages are basic but useful. GitHub Copilot is damn impressive.
- They scanned open source repos and made an LLM out of it. Now companies can profit from open source code without contributing back to the ecosystem. The only contribution they make is the money they pay to Microsoft for Copilot. So Microsoft is profiting from OSS code and stifling its community.
  Does this outweigh the free hosting of the code? IDK
  
  Now companies can profit from open source code without contributing back to the ecosystem.
  They could literally always do that. Unless they changed the software, most open source licenses required nothing but maybe a mention of attribution (which no one will ever read). And some don't even require that. They could also always use FOSS tools to develop software without contributing anything back. How is Copilot different from that?
  And honestly, Copilot is pretty amazing for devs. Why would I care that Microsoft profits off it when it benefits us too? While I love FOSS and all else equal would choose it every time, it's unreasonable to expect everything to be free and open source. People have to make a living somehow and open source rarely pays the bills.
  I'm not sure how Microsoft is stifling the community either. They seem to have been running GitHub great and they've made a lot of great dev tools in recent years. I used to absolutely loath Microsoft, but these days they're mostly alright in my book (at least from a developer PoV). Stuff like how they've handled GitHub, creation of WSL, VS Code, etc have all been great.
  
  I agree with the other comment. It's Open source after all, they could've just crawled the web otherwise.
  Private repos on the other hand is a different story.
  
  I write open source code because I want tools to exist that make the world better, coding AI allow me to make better tools faster so I'm very happy if they used some of my code to train it.
  I've saved hours of research and key poking thanks to AI, these early ones are just the start especially as people use them to help make everything needed to create better ones. We'll get to the point where writing a new floss tool will be as easy as describing it briefly.
- cs.github.com is the best code search ever offered, especially at GitHub scale.
- Yes they did:
  GitHub suspends accounts of Russian developers linked to sanctioned firms
  GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea
  
  They complied to the law they had to? Is this any different from other hosters?

Bro that occurred years ago. Github and linkedin are both owned by Microsoft. It is a funnel from LinkedIn recruitment requiring Github requirements from the recruiters. Unfortunately nobody who is under 30 years old saw these dumb tools getting ripped off.

monopoly: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
GitHub is not a monopoly: it has competition. If you're upset about it's market share, switch to GitLab, Bitbucket, or host your own instance. If you're upset about people not being aware of the other options, be an advocate and spread awareness of the alternatives.
- It's not a monopoly, but it's still an oversized influence on the market. I think the poster is arguing that: when have you heard a recruiter ask you for your bitbucket account? But they will look at github.
  
  If they ask for a GitHub but you have a bitbucket send them the repo link to your bitbucket...
  
  I've put my gitlab link in my resume and it has never had anyone spark a question. Usually the recruiter isn't concerned with it saying "github" so much as you try to answer it with something instead of a blank stare / left on read.

I'm very split between Github (currently) providing a really nice interface/collection/way to access all kinds of open source projects and the obvious 'out-of-control centralisation' by the mega corp Microsoft.
It definitely got a little bit bloated the last years, but I still think it has a generally nice interface (browse code/review stuff, simple issue/PR system, simple way for CI via actions etc.).
But I really hope something like https://forgefed.org/ takes off someday, I feel like if the barriers are much lower to get onto a different network with the same user (without registering etc.) decentralisation can lead to more innovation in this space (management of all the stuff that Git doesn't manage itself, like issues, PRs etc.).
The beauty of Git though is that it's decentralized, so you can just mirror it on Github while mainly using a different platform. If you want a bigger userbase interacting/contributing with your project you'll allow PRs and issues there and if not just add a link to the README that points to the platform you're using...

No, I don't see how GitHub it turning into LinkedIn. Everything you said are definitely new things GitHub is doing but none of them are things LinkedIn does. LinkedIn is pretty much just Facebook with career applications built-in.
- I am not saying they are competing on the same niche. I am saying both sites started well, and they transformed into something worse, profiting by their monopoly on their specific markets.
  
  It sounds like your issue is with capitalism rather than GitHub. The same logic is applicable to many corporations.

Honestly, as others have mentioned, I don't agree its bloated. If anything, its actually missing a few features (like the ability to bulk change many repos with the same issue tags). Also, I like some of the new updates that are being released.
It doesn't run slowly in ANY way.
Furthermore, Sourceforge used to be the monopoly, and honestly, that was FAR more bloated. Projects will be found on any site, if its interesting. I don't remember ever searching for projects explicitly using Github search (I only use Google). A good project will show up anywhere.
- Well I feel like all the "modern" SPA stuff that got recently added, certainly adds "some" kind of bloat on top, it's not as snappy anymore as it once was, but I think most of the stuff is improving QoL, so I think it's reasonable...

I just host my own instance of Gitea.
- This is the way.
  
  I'd rather not have to register on every individuals instance for every project, for bug reporting, discussion, or simple changes.
  On github it's easy for me to contribute and communicate. On other platforms, not.

I wouldn't say it's a new LinkedIn, but it's definitely a defacto monopolio. It pains be that Cargo (the official rust packaging system) is so integrated with it. My own personal hobby projects are self-hosted on a gittea instance right now, but I still have a github account to contribute to a friend of mine's project which is, sadly, hosted there.
- Its not anymore, the new sparse index protocol is not using github.

I was pressured into creating a profile in Linkedin and publish whatever shitty codes I could get on just so I could apply for interviews (which never got past round one). It's funny, because I got my first (and current) job in programming through connections made well before getting into IT.
My github profile is sitting there. Linkedin also sends me regular spams about how $user I never heard of posted some stuff I won't be interested in. Sure, I could actually use my Github as repository for coding outside work hours, it has its uses. But Linkedin? The place where removed gather to suck even more cocks from suits?

Hi! I am new to the programming world, and everything involved. What do you think about gitlab? Many people are using it instead Github. Also I heard about Codeberg, but I dont know anything about it :)
- Advantage of Github over Gitlab is code discoverability. My organization hosts Gitlab instance but I would still rather host my open source project on Github instead, because its impossible to collaborate on Gitlab with external users who dont have an account on our instance.
  Once there is a federation feature similar to Lemmy, I would be happy to host everything there.
  
  This could be what you're looking for. Their main implementation is a gitea fork, but I've seen mentions of gitlab as well. Unfortunately I don't think github would ever consider being compatible, that would just lose them users.
  
  You can use Gitlab exactly the same as GitHub though if you use the hosted Gitlab. I have multiple of my open source projects on Gitlab.com and everyone can access.
- https://sr.ht/
  Gitlab adheres to a “one tool for all the jobs” philosophy and tends to be a performance mess for the end user. Every time I had to use it, I wanted not to.
  SourceHut is a counterexample to claims of monolith superiority gitlab makes. Whether it will continue to be that is an open question, but right now it’s quite a joy to use.
- Gitlab marketing docs heavily mislead you on its capabilities. Technically they are correct, but the way something works is reality isn't often useful (epic boards are a great example).
  This would be ok, but It's really tightly integrated and doesn't provide means for external tools to hook into it usefully.
  For example I think GitLabs CI is the worst on the market but if you integrate another CI you don't have a means to feedback information into Gitlab.
  
  For example I think GitLabs CI is the worst on the market but if you integrate another CI you don't have a means to feedback information into Gitlab.
  You can do almost everything with the Gitlab API so I'm curious what issue you had.
  I'm also not sure why "Gitlab CI is the worst on the market"? I really like in particular that I can have my own gitlab-runner on any machine.
- Every time I have to try to find things on gitlab I have a generally harder time doing so than on github. Maybe I'm just used to github's layout, but gitlab's just seems awkward to me. Also, I think non-tech-savy people will inevitably be confused by having to click "deployments" to get to releases; and on release pages, below where you actually download files, it always says "evidence collection", which sounds really ominous (for end users)
  
  I was thinking about switching to GitLab. But after reading your comment... not so much.
- We use gitlab at work.
  If you're going for hosted, I'd always use github (userbase, UI, free features set). If you're self hosting, gitlab is a good alternative. Their heavy promotion of and focus on full chain into managed cloud can be irritating and annoying though.
  Gitlab has a free tier too. If you're curious, try it out.

Same has happened in recent versions of Gitlab. Lots of feature creep and UI changes that seem non-intuitive (at least for me)

error loading comment
- Yep, moved off GitHub the moment they announced it cuz I thought they were gonna pull the old Microsoft embrace extend extinguish
  
  error loading comment
  
  GitHub is not likely to follow that trend just because it has more value for them if it sticks around. They bought github, I think, for the branding as they've struggled immensely to get people to trust team foundation server and later azure devops brands because they sucked so bad early on. Using GitHub to put an entry-point for azure focused products in front of a huge audience is sly as well. Microsoft only needs to extinguish things if it is a threat (usually when they don't own them). They're happy to buy successful brands and roll them into integrations with their other products, making partnerships with growing orgs hard for said org to avoid. That's what they want possibly more than anything as big enterprises take ages to begin working with entirely net new partners so they look at who they already have agreements with.
  I don't think anyone needs to be on github that's just there for OSS projects (ie. being hosted on gitlab or somewhere else should be fine so long as it is public and search-indexed). Internet search and content aggregating platforms are good enough at getting me to where I need to go. GitHub's search has never really been useful for me on that front.

Fun fact...
A few years ago Microsoft was granted a patent on using social media data left behind to resurrect dead people as chatbots.
The more GitHub is considered to be a social network, the more extending the content there (such as the maintenance of a popular sole-contributor project) fits into a patent protected usecase.
And now you know 🌈

Haven't looked at LinkedIn in years, it's just full of low quality recruiters who "have the perfect full stack position for you" that's clearly a front-end or backend position using obscure languages you've got no interest in.
Glad I don't have to use these vultures

As an aside, anybody looking at alternatives or just similar tools should check out pijul which is another vcs that implements a very interesting algorithm for patches. They also host a very simple interface at https://nest.pijul.com.

We're going to need a replacement for github pretty soon.
- There are many good replacements, you just need to stop using Github :)
  Some examples: Forgejo/Gitea (self-host or hosted eg. codeberg.de), Gitlab (self-host or hosted), Sourcehut (self-host or hosted eg. sr.ht)
  
  @unicorn @Hypx self-hosted is ok only if you don't want any contributions.
  Otherwise self-hosted solution becomes a yet another barrier for the person who wants to contribute.
- What makes you think we need a replacement soon?
  
  @Kissaki @sizeoftheuniverse
  GitHub is owned by Microsoft and it seems to be getting worse. It is also nearly a monopoly and that’s bad in general.

I mean, both of them have common ownership. Maybe just correlation and not causation, but I've definitely noticed these types of changes post acquisition.

151 comments