Please Stop Using Github

github ice activism

I mentioned on twitter that I’ve stopped using Github because of their continued support of ICE. To be clear, it’s not just that ICE uses Github. It’s that they think supporting ICE is okay because ICE is responsible for things other than putting children in cages. Their statement misses the point in so many ways, I have very little hope they’ll ever see past their own justifications on this.

So, no more Github. This has some very real impact for me - I’ve used github for a long time, I’ve used its social media features and been a paid subscriber for years. Dropping github is annoying. But we must stop supporting organizations that are in turn supporting fascism. I encourage anyone reading this to follow my lead and give up on github.

Good alternatives exist: Gitlab has a free tier very similar to Github’s if you want a drop-in hosted replacement. gitea is what I’ve opted for, because at this point I just feel exhausted by large, hosted solutions; it’s a lovely, community-driven open source project. It has a docker image that is very easy to set up, and it supports U2F/webauthn. And of course, you can also just keep bare git repositories on a server and push to them with SSH, although that loses all of the convenience and discoverability of a git solution with a web interface.