from Hacker News

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

by bessarabov on 2/5/24, 9:08 PM with 82 comments

  • by simonw on 2/5/24, 9:21 PM

    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.

  • by calrain on 2/5/24, 9:27 PM

    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.

  • by andrewstuart on 2/5/24, 9:29 PM

    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.

  • by petercooper on 2/5/24, 9:40 PM

    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.

  • by cloudhead on 2/5/24, 10:18 PM

    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/

  • by kragen on 2/19/24, 3:28 PM

    this is stunning

    does anyone have a public mirror of the tweets?

  • by antonvs on 2/5/24, 9:24 PM

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

  • by wg0 on 2/6/24, 11:57 AM

    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.

  • by Xeamek on 2/5/24, 9:33 PM

    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

  • by superkuh on 2/5/24, 9:13 PM

    Everyone centralizing in Github is very, very unhealthy and fragile.

  • by aiw1nt3rs on 2/5/24, 9:35 PM

    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.

  • by segphault on 2/5/24, 9:27 PM

    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.

  • by wg0 on 2/5/24, 9:12 PM

    Scary to think about that.

  • by tonfreed on 2/6/24, 6:02 AM

    One of the reasons I have my own gitea box now

  • by Ameo on 2/5/24, 9:27 PM

    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.

  • by beanjuiceII on 2/5/24, 9:15 PM

    calm down its already back