GitHub blocked me and all my libraries
medium.com
medium.com
The author's comparison to internment camps and other dramatic measures of government suppression seems unfair. Github not providing reasoning is also unfair, but seems to be standard practice among corporations (maybe to help with liability?). The questions Github is asking from the user relate to U.S. OFAC policy, which is how the U.S. enforces economic sanctions. Basically if you've done business with North Korea or a number of other flagged entities you can be held liable criminally or more often for huge fines.
I don't know how the author triggered whatever automatic suspension mechanism github has in place, but I think github should priorize the author's case given their contribution to the community. I don't think Github is an evil organization. I do think OFAC policy is difficult to enforce and the U.S. gov should make it easier. If Github reported the number of suspensions, who was suspended or explain why a suspension happened I would have more trust in them as a platform.
Possibly liability, but also to keep people from gaming the system. Hard policy lines about exactly what is and is not okay end up being gamed by people that technically don't violate them but cause all the same problems that the policy was instituted to stop.[1] If the reasoning for the ban is explicitly laid out, but the person doesn't quite meet it through definitive evidence (but possibly easily meets it through a preponderance of circumstantial evidence), that's may indicate someone is gaming the rules. Acting on that person in that case may just lead to a bunch of bad press as people argue over whether it was justified. It's in the company's interest to keep it vague so a defense of that sort is harder to put forth.
That's not to say I think this is necessarily good, just that I can see how it came to be somewhat the norm. In a better world, we'd have something more like the legal system, with a case, a defense and offense, an a jury of peers. Unfortunately, that's too time consuming, resource intensive, expensive, and takes control away from the business, so it will never happen.
1: This is easy to do. For example, continuously make statements that are construed as attacks by the group you are targeting, but are less known as attacks outside that group, and feign ignorance when called on it. It polarizes those around, and also causes the targets to become hyper-sensitive to benign statements and causes false-positives, which is more evidence to others that the same group is overreacting, causing more polarization. Open source communities have been ripped apart by this. America seems to be getting ripped apart by this.
There's no good solution, because people aren't good. If you want to make someone a cynic for life, have them moderate a random social media website for a few days.
When the system is there to protect the company, I understand this position. When it's a system forced on them by law, I really don't think playing games with their users serves any reasonable purpose.
Laws should be black and white and people "toeing the line" should be treated no differently beyond verifying that they are indeed on one side or the other.
I get that the law puts the onus on companies to verify compliance and that creates an incentive for companies to draw an artificially strict rule of their own.
Nevertheless I think it's important to keep the distinction between a company acting as the police and a company that has a policy serving its own interests. When you're the police you don't get to hide the evidence or the charge against the person you've arrested at least in free countries.
Laws are almost never black and white when put into practice, because that's not justice. There are plenty of times extenuating circumstances change how laws are applied by judges and by juries, and that's how it should be, because the law can never accurately portray every possible situation in real life, even if the lawmakers would have wanted an exception for that circumstance. That's why there's talk about the "spirit of the law", which is meant to convey what the law attempts to do.
> I get that the law puts the onus on companies to verify compliance and that creates an incentive for companies to draw an artificially strict rule of their own.
As soon as you shift responsibility to a company, they are going to do the thing that's best for them, whether that be thr cheapest, easiest to defend, or best to drive more business. That's their incentive structure, they will apply that to anything they are told to do. No point in us getting mad about it, if we don't want that incentive applied to the problem, don't make companies responsible for it (there are other solutions, such as implementing a tax that's used by third partied for reviewing cases, or any number of other things).
> When you're the police you don't get to hide the evidence or the charge against the person you've arrested at least in free countries.
You don't when there's a court. But without a requirement for a court, sure you do. If it's not a court, such as with state and federal fines, I think often it's down to whether the statutes give you ways to dispute something, and otherwise if it somehow infringes on your rights. I'm not sure being told you aren't allowed to use a company's service infringes on your rights, as they generally reserve the right to refuse service.
There are some laws for which this will never be the case:
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-...
> In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner. In other words, fair use is a defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If your use qualifies as a fair use, then it would not be considered an infringement.
> So what is a “transformative” use? If this definition seems ambiguous or vague, be aware that millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent attempting to define what qualifies as a fair use. There are no hard-and-fast rules, only general guidelines and varied court decisions, because the judges and lawmakers who created the fair use exception did not want to limit its definition. Like free speech, they wanted it to have an expansive meaning that could be open to interpretation.
Yes, that means that any of the "rules" about things which are guaranteed to be Fair Use you were taught are wrong. The law doesn't work that way, it's designed to not work that way, and the courts will never be persuaded that it ought to work that way.
its...getting there. There are good arguments to suggest new Microsoft is the same as old Microsoft and this might be one of them. Github frantically clawing for control of developers, while blindly enforcing things like ITAR are a classic Microsoft case of directionless middle management vying for government rent-seeking and free market capital at the same time.
Either MS fixes this quick, or FLOSS projects will rightly start hosting things elsewhere. free software is free as in speech, and in most cases this crap is interpreted as outright censorship.
They should be doing that anyway, and it should be happening RIGHT NOW, not because of this single dev account suspension but because centralization of control is the antithesis of FOSS, the fact that the community is centralized around github is a clear and present danger to said community.
and no the solution it not for everyone to just move to gitlab, I can see that coming as well, replacing github with hosted gitlab would simply replicate the problem
We as a community need to the distributed, not centralized
Opensource on the whole doesn't pay unless it's sponsored by a company.
At minimum, a Raspberry Pi and an internet connection will do. If you want something a bit more reliable, you can get a virtual server for $5/month and host many repos on it.
How so? A hosted gitlab instance makes you immune from the administrative whims of any particular corporation.
It's possible that gitlab the company stops maintaining the free editions but that's not very much different from other pieces of software going unmaintained.
All the older project hosting software suites like sourceforge/gforge/savannah are still available.
Git itself is very easy to use in a distribute manner, but I guess some form of distributed issue tracker is missing?
Not Self Hosting a GitLab environment yourself.
GitLab.com, not Self-Managed
...We must be experiencing very different versions of reality. Usually I sort-of get where people are coming from, even when I disagree. Here, I couldn't even name anything Github is doing that would support these statements. What power do they have, except being a useful product?
[Edit]: Here is another using the BitTorrent protocol - https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent
I think GitHub should prioritize the case regardless of the authors contributions to the community, or how popular their Medium post gets.
A case regarding a popular contributor should be prioritized over someone who has contributed nothing, as it'll have an impact on those who rely on those contributions.
There is absolutely no normative contribution to such practice being common. It is entirely unacceptable. GitHub is a public good, even if technically it's owned by a private corporation.
GitHub shouldn't "prioritize the author's case" - it should not remove people automatically this way. See my other, independent comment.
That by itself is bad behavior and general misconduct in the broader community. That one-liner is not acceptable. We should be shaming organisations that do it. Appealing to legal liability is not an excuse either. If you accuse someone you must actually make a accusation they can answer. Vagueness of explanation is generally not a constructive path for guiding behavior. Otherwise we increase unfairness and ultimately make society worse. [1]
None of this prevents a rapid banhammer for legal reasons and similar. Sometimes a ops team has to take rapid action. I get it. But the process for working out the specifics and working towards a resolution shouldn't be vague or convoluted either.
[1] making society worse is actually being evil. Increasing the background level of unfairness and injustice is being evil. A lot of corporations are already on this path.
I run showdead, and most shadowbanned accounts deserve it. I also rescue the occasional comment from the grave.
Do the moderators un-shadowban users if they get enough vouched comments? No idea, but they do have enough information to do so.
When I run across such an account, should I email an HN mod to investigate? I wouldn't mind doing that, but I've tried before and never got a reply back -- so not sure what the outcome was.
It's stupid as fuck. Reddit is also plagued by it.
Emailing a mod can't hurt, though.
Self-hosting is better, I agree, but people use medium, github, twitter, youtube etc because they'll instantly have a much bigger audience. I mean a self-hosted github alternative should be easy to set up on your own servers.
Actually if you operate a JS library with things like a CDN and hosted icons, you probably should. Sure, github is free for things like that, but you - and your users who depend on you - cannot depend on them.
That's right, but that's because the way a lot of us imagined this did not involve relying on third parties with other agendas to host cost that we write that others rely on in production.
> It's 2020, we should have some way to connect them
We do: set up your own hosting for projects that you provide that others rely on in production.
Oh, that costs money, you say? First, hosting is cheap these days. Second, if your code is used by so many people, at least some of them will probably be willing to pay for it.
Being a software developer is a well-paid job indeed, but that guy was offering (some of) his work for free, and apparently other developers made some use of it. And now you are blaming him for the fact that he was not also paying extra for being able to share his work.
As much as I support self-hosting and not relying on third-parties, attitude like this is bullshit.
It's not the guy's fault that Github behaved poorly, yes.
It is the guy's fault that he relied on an untrustworthy third party to host his code that lots of other people were using in production, meaning they lost access to it when that third party screwed him.
> now you are blaming him for the fact that he was not also paying extra for being able to share his work.
No, I'm blaming him for using an untrustworthy third party to provide production code to other people who were depending on him. If he can find a way to provide his code to others for free without doing that, that's fine.
Btw, I probably should make clear that all of those others who are using his code are also to blame if they don't have a plan in place to deal with this situation.
Also, "paying extra for being able to share his work" is not correct. If he's willing to share his work with the explicit disclaimer that he doesn't control the access to the shared hosting where the work is available, so he makes no guarantee that others will always be able to find it and access it, that's fine too. But clearly he didn't intend to share his work with that disclaimer. And the only way to be sure others can access your work is to host it yourself, so you control access.
He can literally git push to any webhost and they can literally git pull from there, or has everyone just forgotten how git and the web actually works? He can drop a zip file somewhere the way we used to do back in the ancient days. And that's not even considering the plethora of other hosted Git portals he could push to as well.
And everyone still has access to their own repositories. They only thing anyone has lost here is momentary convenience.
No, what we all lost here all the other meta-information which is not code, but is still part of the project.
I agree, he could (at least for the code itself--he can't do that with other meta-information, as another commenter pointed out). But apparently he isn't since Github locking his account appears to be such a big issue for him. (Unless he is already up and running on Gitlab--he says he's moving to there.)
I guess, the only safe way to host something is to use onion network.
See the difference? Domains were not seized, traffic was not silently redirected to /dev/null. Microsoft could do something along these lines too, but instead just chose to be evil.
I understand when a corporation needs some CYA policy to avoid charges of "hostile environment" or whatever. But for whole open source development world be the hostage of these policies is not a normal situation. We need separation of corporate PC and technology, otherwise it ends in a lot of trouble for everybody.
> Also, apparently, all my comments in all issues in all other repos have instantly disappeared for anyone other than me, and some of those comments contained a lot of really useful and valuable information/knowledge/solutions
Reminded me of something: I was following a thread in a Github issue, received an email that had a useful answer but was hard to read due to gmail not formatting code well. I let it be and the next day went to the thread and the comment was nowhere to be found. I wonder if something similar happened.
Companies that pay for GitHub and have remote workers that may trip up the detection system should take note of this situation. They could lose their employees work in an instant.
I offer free Fossil hosting [1].
how is that different than github?
You're right. Just getting the terminology wrong.
I should start using Fossil more; seems like things are getting out of hand in an implicit way.
Ultimately, people that get banned from a site usually complain about it because they want something the site offers that they can't build themselves. People can distribute the source code without Github's help; what they offer is nice, but not essential. The community is hard to clone, though; and the community is a great way to get pull requests, bug reports, manage permissions, setup CI sandboxes, etc. (It reminds me a lot of YouTubers complaining about YouTube. The reason they don't self-host videos is not because it's hard to put an mp4 file on a webserver and let people download it. The part they can't reproduce is YouTube's steady stream of viewers and advertiser relationships. That is why they whine when YouTube demonitizes a video, but they don't leave the platform -- YouTube has something that they can't make themselves. Github is similar, though in my opinion, a lot less important.)
The thing is that Fossil is not just the code source, it's the issues, wiki and all the information around. Basically a self-hosted GitHub, so you can take all information with you, not just the code.
I see your homepage handles user signup data and it might expose your users to eavesdropping.
I still use github because it is convenient for many other people, but it is always a mirror of the canonical repository, which runs under my control on AWS (and is fully replicated locally).
I understand the convenience, but once burned, twice shy: I'm never going to rely on 3rd party code hosting services ever again.
Then I would self host.
If still angry then I would create a liceasd that doesn't allow Microsoft/github/etc to use your product in anyway. Share to lib users with self hosted link.
This would actually cause your project to no longer be open source. AGPLv3 is probably the closest you can get, forcing anyone who uses your project, even on a server and not distributed to end-users, to contribute all changes back.
It does feel like a poison pill that would reduce usage. But maybe it's worth it.
Actually, it doesn't quite do that. It treats "providing access to via a network" as "distribution", and requires the source to be provided, under the AGPL, to users who ask. For example, if Hacker News was AGPL'd (and not copyright owned by Y Combinator), I could ask Y Combinator for the source and they'd have to give it to me… but they wouldn't have to provide the original developers their patches.
If, say, this AGPL Hacker News was only available to people within Y Combinator, I wouldn't be entitled to receiving a copy of the source from the company. I'm not a user, you see. (Notably, the original developers aren't entitled to Y Combinator's fork, unless they're also being provided the software.) But I could ask a friendly employee for a copy, and they could get it for me, and then I could give it to anybody who wanted it as per normal GPL rules.
Perhaps he was pushing code from his holiday in Crimea and his IP got tagged. Something like that would possibly do it.
There's no reason for you or me to be supportive of Microsoft in this situation.
Second, it's not only that guy who's at loss, it's also all the people who used or might use his software. Are those people responsible for Russian government's actions too?
Why shouldn't people who collectively, i.e. en masse, support their government by actively disrespecting other country sovereignty and border (e.g. visiting Crimea) shouldn't be hold responsible? I think they should! And it looks like I'm not alone, check out the list of countries who support sanctions against Russian companies and individuals. As for the damage done to the OSS, I believe it's pretty minimal. He'll just move his stuff to GitLab, end of story.
Indeed, it's a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders given they are a listed company.
> post that on Medium
Hoo boy.
...I guess that's what the blockchain is for - to mediate conflicts. Feels gross to me, though.
One obvious choice is that there's only one maintainer doing merges -- if they sign and push different content to different repos, it's a problem of their own making. So unless they screw up, there's no need to worry.
Other than that, you could give priority to any change based on e.g. its timestamp or hash. Sounds arbitrary? Yes, but such is life. If two people push a branch to be merged simultaneously to a repo where everything is merged to master after rebasing, one of them (depending on luck) is going to find that their commits landed while the other soons finds out that they need to rebase and try again. In a scenario with multiple mirrors, you'd obviously want to try to use the same repo when possible, but if you don't, it'll take a little longer for you to find out that your stuff was overruled by changes in another mirror.
Sanctions aren't really logical when you get down to it -- at face value they're supposed to put a specific stress to either motivate a population for change or impact the bottom line of targets enough to frustrate them into cooperation.
In reality, the targets of sanctions typically are not affected, and those who are affected lack the ability to make meaningful change in the near future or even an extended future.
Basically, even if you do something like this and replicate using a system outside of the intended mechanism, the sanction-ers' response is simply "why aren't you just banning them?"
Call me cynical, but if the cost is bad publicity vs favor with the US government, it's not hard to see why a given company would choose favor.
(I don't condone this, but I've lived in Russia for 6-ish years now as an ex-patriate -- it's...pretty clear that the sanctions affect no one they're intended to, and it's not like Russians haven't tried to change the status quo (they really have). But really, nothing has changed since the sanctions were imposed except a readjustment of prices and salaries)
Each entity can easy be forced not to replicate content from a sister jurisdiction or allow connections from within that jurisdiction but how are they supposed to keep entities from pulling data through a proxy they themselves are not appraised of or a client pulling data from multiple centers to get the complete picture.
Censorship in that case merely makes service slower not nonexistent.
I am not sure if it is possible but (not FOSS) competition could use this flagging mechanism to prop their own business.
I’d say this type of brhaviour from GH is somewhat abusive. Had they given an explaination that such and such rule was violated I’d be a lot more forgiving... Just my 2c
My god, not Crimea, where all the crime is produced and then shipped all over the world.
The whole process is still messed up, even if he had been to Crimea, Iran or, god forbid, Cuba. No explanation why, no ability to challenge the flagging (yes, a form exists, but apparently it goes to /dev/null) etc.
But the process being messed up is 100% up to the government, Github has nothing to do with it.
Instead, they chose the Google route and simply offer zero support and no way to challenge the (likely automatic) decision. I doubt that secrecy is part of the law, if their reason even is a law.
I actually don't object to sanctioning the area - it is less aggressive than sanctioning all of Russia, and Russians entering Crimea against the wishes of the Ukrainian government could be seen as invaders. After all, the original invasion was done under the cover of "mercenary separatists" who did not identify themselves as the soldiers that they were. And let's not forget, those "separatists" did also shoot down a civilian airliner with a Russian anti-air missile, killing hundreds.
Personally, I would prefer that organizations like Github remain impartial to this sort of thing, but they aren't discriminating against Crimea in particular; they're applying the same "it's out of our hands" attitude as they do for developers from areas with similar sanctions, such as Iran.
RE github staying impartial: yes, that would be nice. I suppose there would be a market for independent countries to do this, but I doubt it's large enough to outweigh the damage done by resisting the pressure of the big players.
If a nominally-Turkish user started regularly logging in from Syria, I could see there being the same sort of military/security concerns. And I could see that user getting just as indignant if they were, say, an aid worker.
Is it right? Probably not, but it seems understandable when state-sanctioned violence is involved.
Github is trembling in their boots.
Issue tracking and SCM features needs to live inside the Git repo or at least in a decentralized app. Git is supposed to be decentralized by nature. Everyone is so content with GitHub and GitLab that not much innovation has happened for decentralizing SCM as a whole. They have so much money and resources that they can blackhole anyone who says otherwise.
That doesn't look like reason for blocking an account and all the repository. Probably Github should delete such comment and send email to poster to repost comment without using any offensive words (As per their dictionary).
I look forward to the pearl-clutchers in the thread walking back their overheated rhetoric.
“Ain’t no problem, bruh!”, — I thought. You know, we developers should stand for each other. Only that I’m more used to GitHub so I’ve posted a (now deleted) issue rather than a tweet. The issue was titled “You’re a [funny-word]” where [funny-word] was a set of latin characters reminding a transliterated Russian half-offensive word for “gay”, while not being equal to that specific word. Think of something like “mother-lucker” or “mother-trucker”.
Github was pretty reliable for a long time. oh well... I guess the flaw of code centralization should have warned us.
Related note while we're banning people for word selection:
Does github realise that "git" has a pejorative association? Its not actually a polite word. If you were to call me a "git" in comments on any of my projects it would be an automatic code-of-conduct violation. You'd get one very specific warning about abusive word use then you'd be blocked.
Are they aware of this? Its always made me laugh. They've basically put a minor league swear/offensive word in the name of their corporation.
PS Please don't explain why the git tool is named git. Or why github was named. I already know. Just understand that "git" is similar and has as much offensive weight as pointedly calling someone a "worthless idiot". You're actually being deliberately offensive. In some places you would also likely get a punch in the face depending on who you insulted. Its at that level of offensiveness. Different cultures etc.
Sorry, it's not your intellectual property anymore, it belongs to Microsoft now. People tend to forget Microsoft owns GitHub nowadays, and also tend to forget Microsoft is a corporation.
Even if an account is ever closed due to a terms of service or policy violation and the issue could not be resolved through customer service channels (exceedingly unlikely but possible) -- you and every other user would still be able to download YOUR DATA from YOUR ACCOUNT, even if the account was closed or suspended...
It's amazing what passes for both "customer service" and software "usability" these days...
1. Demonstrable just cause for removal, fully communicated to the removed user.
2. Due process - before and after the removal (some kind of prior notice, ability to challenge claims against you, adjudication mechanism, appeal mechanism etc.)
3. Community notification about the removal - no axing accounts in secret.
> “If you accessed GitHub.com while you were visiting Iran, North Korea, Syria, or Crimea, please tell us why you used GitHub.com.”
He may have tripped over the US government sanctions.
I also feel that it's poor taste for a Russian living in an authoritarian state to liken github to the gulag.
I'm not saying that to defend Russia, but here the authoritarian state imposing unilateral sanctions to individuals and companies of a few selected states is the US... This is also sometimes done against EU companies as well. This needs to change.
The ire at such situation can be of basically of two forms: "I wish this damned government didn't antagonize the rest of the world", and "I wish those bloody foregners didn't antagonize this country". And if the person doesn't actually suffer from any repressions from the occupying country, the first raction is unlikely, especially after 6 years of being surrounded by the state propaganda.
If Microsoft is no better than Roskomnadzor (and in this case it isn't), than he's rightfully doing so. Russian government being shitty is no excuse for the US government or US companies to be shitty as well.
Unless you setup a local caching, non-deleting, JFrog artifactory for all your dependencies (only jar files are covered in the free version BTW, and there aren't any tools that handle all those repo types in the OSS world), you are going to depend on external URLs.
Locally caching dependencies is not trivial.
Also, some tools try to download things from the internet as part of the BUILD process. I also disable that using another tool [2].
Combined this really helps in being able to build my software when upstream goes away.
[0] http://hashcache.rkeene.org/ [1] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/hashcache/ [2] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/bash-drop-netwo...
> Flagged”? So this is how you call “disposing of someone” in a “politically correct” manner nowadays — you “flag” them. “The United States flagged 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II”. Yeah, much friendlier than: “The United States forcefully relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps about 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II”.
Yes, Russia did it to uncounted millions of their own, and actually murdered many millions of those, for decades. That does not excuse US behavior: both are indefensible. The US has, at this moment, more people imprisoned than any other country. The US doesn't seem to harvest their organs, at least on a grand scale, but does engage in slavery: products stamped "made in USA" are now quite likely to be produced by enforced prison labor, particularly in Louisiana.
Solitary confinement for months or years on end, and withholding medical treatment are certified torture methods, and routine practice in US prisons. The American Way is to have corporations do it under contract, somehow absolving government officials of responsibility.
Though that might just be my hatred for medium and its walls talking.
As for this case, I don't know what's going on, and can't tell from the article, but a user 1) from Russia, 2) with a "drug name" in their handle is not the picture perfect story of corporation friendly. Too bad for his users!
Whoa!! What an astonishing comparison!
Go host your software on gitlab, IPFS, or some other service and please don't bother comparing your experience hosting software with forced internment.
> Remind me, GitHub, since when are you Ordnungspolizei? Who exactly granted you the authority to interrogate and police regular people?
B...b...but it's their server, their disk space. You granted them the authority by showing up at their doorstep asking for the service.
Finding some random github repo is almost worse than nothing to me. without some third party indicator as to quality, it's not worth my time, because I don't have time to review and assess everything I come across, only the items that I have some indication actually do what I need and do it sufficiently.
Language package repositories (npmjs.com, crates.io, etc.) or documentation hosting sites (docs.rs) tend to rank pretty well on Google, generally about the same as GitHub. For me personally a lot of project discovery also happens via either Reddit or HN.
It's still a pretty big barrier for contributions, but at least discovery seems to be decently decentralized.
I have no idea why would I search on Github exclusively. That's sounds too limiting.
How exactly has GitHub done that? What actions has GitHub taken, other than providing a useful service?
Open source developers have chosen to make GitHub a near monopoly.
Companies love GitHub because they think it provides metrics. Mediocre developers (the kind that gets influence in OSS projects) love GitHub because they appear productive.
I'm not blaming Github for this, I'm just pointing out that this is a serious problem. Even if you're a 100% benevolent company today, there's no telling what will happen in the arbitrary future.
There is hope with Federated Code Hosting being developed.
Github has done nothing of the sort - they're popular, but being popular is not the same as having a monopoly.
> The likelihood of your software being discovered, used or contributed to goes to zero as soon as you host it anywhere but GitHub.
Untrue. It's less likely, because again Github is more popular, but not zero, because popularity isn't monopoly. Active projects do exist elsewhere, people still use projects hosted on Sourceforge FFS.
Unless Github can forcibly prevent competitors from arising by leveraging their control over resources or a legal advantage granted them by the government, they don't have a monopoly.
User visibility is a resource. While overwhelming popularity is not the same as a Monopoly (since they are from 2 different perspectives, they can't be equated), the effect is often the same.
OP could have spent their blog post informing users that the project would be hosted elsewhere, rather than going on a rant comparing Github to the Nazis, and that precious user visibility wouldn't have kept their userbase from moving elsewhere.
Oh wait, they did, at the end of their post. So... why are we even here then?
But if you want to talk to your grandparents, you need to use Facebook.
Or skype, or email, or text or call them or maybe just visit once it a while.
Facebook doesn't have nearly the degree of monopoly on general human communication or mass communication that HN argues it does, neither does Twitter. If Trump weren't addicted to posting there, no one would care about Twitter.
Oh wait.
Having discovered it account creation DOES present a barrier to entry for those that want to contribute but nowadays many such services allow one to sign in with a social service. For example Gitlab.com allows one to sign on with google, twitter, salesforce, github, or bitbucket. Likely reducing the barrier to account creation to 30 seconds via oauth or 1 minute to create a new account via email.
I don't find it credible that people who want to contribute hours to hundreds of hours of work will be liable to be put off by the need to do half a minute of work.
I'm often pissed some obscure piece of software doesn't seem to exist, contemplate writing it myself, decide to append github to the search query and find someone who already wrote it.
Litterally a day ago that's how I found https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice
or apt, or cpan, or ctan, or cran, or PyPi, or ...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...
Bruce Perens has as well: https://perens.com/2019/10/12/invasion-of-the-ethical-licens...
Or you can find that DF story where ESR's creepiness towards women was misattributed to RMS.
I understand: it's frustrating and maybe undeserved that a service has banned you. But comparisons to the Second World War, concentration camps and the treatment of Jews by Nazi Germany are really, really not appropriate. Take a breath.