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In my opinion, there is no question that GitHub is the new Facebook for coders and geeks. What I mean by the new Facebook is two-fold, first the type of users you find on GitHub and secondly the businesses shenanigans over the years.
Essentially, GitHub is now a necessity when you are applying for jobs inside the tech industry, recruiters look for it, businesses are requiring it and insist you engage in coding challenges that must be done on the platform. This doesn't sound like a bad thing really, or does it?
YES, actually, it does!
GitHub has now become a shit storm of individuals seeking to pimp out their profiles with bullshit Pull Requests, faking timelines, forking repos and raising entirely pointless issues. Everything with the goal of showcasing how much they have contributed to open-source projects. As a recent example look no further than Digital Oceans Hacktoberfest clusterfuck, useless PRs such as deleting spaces all in the hopes of getting a t-shirt.
Another real world dilemma impacting users is the knowledge gap of actually using git normally, GitHub is NOT git. GitHub is a proprietary closed-source front-end for a centralized git hosting service. Users have become completely dependent on features that GitHub have built such as PRs, forks, online editing, branch protection to name a couple. I doubt that many users are even aware of commands such as send-mail which is a core function of many projects outside the GitHub world. Nor does it help when the web interface of GitHub encourages sloppy git practices, relying exclusively on one way of doing things, the GitHub Flow.
Let's start off with the obvious fact that Microsoft owns GitHub. Microsoft has a long track record of open-source hatred, the CEO has even gone as far as stating "Linux is a cancer" at one point. This is not good, Microsoft were outed by the U.S. Department of Justice for using this internal term. In short, it ties in well with buying their way into open source projects right? Sounds like GitHub is at the Embrace stage...
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" [5]
Electron, the Chromium engine / NodeJS pile of shit that requires a few Cray supercomputers to run a calculator app on was developed and pushed into the ecosystem by good friends, GitHub. Now we are blessed with awesome spyware programs such as WhatsApp, Discord and Skype that will now run on Linux YAY /s. I mean there is just so much mud around GitHub that I just don't have the urge to go wading through it, searching even more than I have already. Here's a short fire list with some sources to follow-up on, if you are interested.
Due to an incredibly weak DMCA take down notice by the RIAA, youtube-dl was recently banned by GitHub. After it hit main stream news GitHub crapped the bed and started on the news PR. It was not, however, until after the EFF moved in and sent a letter [10] to GitHub describing how the DMCA notification was absolute dog shit that GitHub did something. After this, GitHub went into complete PR mode after and they made it out that they were the saviours of the day and how they'd stronger and better in the future.
Anyway, enough of this rant. If you are looking for a 3rd party hosted git solution then please take a look at these two:
Or do what I do an just use the naked git protocol without any front-ends, its stupidly simple.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/10/01/Spamtoberfest.html
https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/index.html
https://davelane.nz/microsoft-there-way-win-our-trust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish