GitHub is SCM hosting for git (the distributed nature of git enables people to create companies around this)

I’ve used GitHub since December 2011. I only started using it for actual work (...and with ‘actual’ I mean personal projects) around 2017 and it’s a really great product but I see some concerning new features popping up

Social media and connecting with random people is a really, really bad idea. This will be even worse in the software industry where the ego problem is fairly apparent. TechLead described what this is like at Facebook and I’m sure everyone in industry has been subjected to the ego problem at some stage in their career

For me, the social component of SCM hosting (in this case: GitHub) raises many questions

Why do I want followers?

What would I gain if I had x amount of followers on GitHub?

I can understand the concept of a follower on social media in the sense that each follower represents a potential customer

I’m fairly certain no one would be interested in buying any of the projects I’m working on and GitHub features like Sponsors don’t work in every country so I really don’t see the purpose of followers in any way

The list of countries GitHub Sponsors supports

It would be totally different if GitHub Sponsors is supported in all countries, then I can understand the appeal of wanting to attract more sponsors but it looks like a lot of the supported countries are first-world countries and there is no indication as to when South Africa and Thailand would become supported countries

What’s up with those badges?

Mostly all GitHub users have the arctic vault badge and all the users that have the mars helicopter badge are kernel developers or language designers

If these are street cred things then there should be no extremes. It would be better to gain a badge for every x amount of commits or something like this

How do I disable the social components of GitHub?

I’m sure some people would like to be social on GitHub and that’s totally fine but what about the people that don’t want to be social on GitHub?

I haven’t found the configuration option that would disable the social components on GitHub so I think this social concept is here to stay

I don’t want a social news feed of sorts after I login via the web. How do I disable it?

When I had a Facebook account, I would literally unfollow every friend (the connection is still there so I could still view their profile but the activity is not aggregated on my news feed) and mute every page I liked. I did this because I like going to content and not having the content come to me

If GitHub forces some social news feed that contains other people's content, I’ll most certainly move to another git hosting provider (I’ve listed alternatives to GitHub below)

Right now, I’m not following anyone on GitHub but there is an “Explore GitHub” button that is quite apparent. I won’t be doing that anytime soon

Alternatives to GitHub

There are many other alternatives to GitHub

Google Source Repositories

GSR is actually pretty cool. I used GCP as my cloud provider and I like the fact that GSR can plug really easily into other GCP products fairly easily (CloudBuild for example). There is definitely no social media aspect to GSR which is really good and I hope it stays like this

AWS CodeCommit

I haven’t used AWS CodeCommit but it does look like it’ll do the job and I guess the appeal would be that of GSR but for AWS

GitLab

All of my professional projects are hosted in Enterprise GitLab and it works really well. The feature set is really rich (includes a Wiki, CI/CD, groups etc). GitLab would not be my best choice because I do see some social components in here too (the profile has a “follow” button)

Gitea

I haven't used Gitea deep enough to determine if it's a suitable candidate but it was simple to install via the Linode Marketplace and it did work