Ask HN: Is GitHub preparing to go behind a login wall?

Hard to say, the only people who know are those internal to MS and GH and know, or who have told others. You have copies of your repos in other systems, yeah? Have a plan you don't need rather than need a plan you don't have.

Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44876289 - August 2025 (97 comments)

I don't have an immediate direct source but read yesterday GitHub stars are being "obfuscated" because they're being scraped to spam popular projects -- or something similar.

Edit found the link [0], do not believe it mentions reason but links github blog

From Github [1]: > These endpoints and views currently expose public lists of stargazers and watchers, and this information has increasingly been misused to collect user data for spam activities which negatively impacts user experience and platform trust.

[0]: https://www.star-history.com/blog/github-stargazer-api-restr...

[1] https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-res...

Looking at how much work GitLab has to do due to abuse of being open, I don't blame anyone for wanting to make that change.

The whole GitHub infra is cracking under the AI-boom's increased load. This can very well be just another symptom of the same thing.

Just to nitpick, requiring a free account is substantially different from a paywall.

Advanced Search doesn't work unless you're logged in, but it's been like that for at least a year.

I believe so. I cannot view any repository from my phone. It asks me to log in first.

With AI and all the new projects/forks/updates, github is one busy place.

I wasn't browsing /trending on github until I started using AI, wanting to see what cool projects people are working on.

Fine for my closed source stuff, but my open source work is specifically meant to be viewable, even by non-technical people doing recruitment or looking over my portfolio.

I've put up with a lot of stuff, but this would be my personal last straw.

that is github.com you are referring to, would pulling public repos the curl -fsSL way need to be authenticated?

I think this would push even more small to medium sized busineses towards self hosting which I would love to see

I think it’s been functionally login-only for a while, unfortunately.

Any time I try to use the site while logged out I immediately hit all sorts of rate limits and spam prevention measures. Issues and pull requests stop loading almost immediately. Searches are extremely restricted, like i think literally one search is all you get sometimes unless you login.

It’s hard to tell how much of this is intentional and how much is GitHub infra not being stable. My daily renovate bot that looks for updates for specific packages times out and encounters errors almost every time it runs and it’s barely doing anything. And it has an api key. I know I’m not hitting limits, some queries just don’t work >50% of the time on some repos.

Sometimes I see there are 200 issues, I click the issues tab, and there are zero. Is GitHub down? Am I rate limited? Do I just need to login? Or I know an issue/PR exists, and it just doesn’t appear when I search for the title or keywords verbatim. I just manually bookmark or subscribe to any important issue or PR now because the UI can’t be trusted anymore.

AI ruined everything. They have to protect "their" code.

GitHub specifically put out a changelog about the stargazers API endpoint to restrict open access because of its use for spam and abuse. I believe this is more about user data than code. Obviously restricting public access to Git would be a different tier.

I can't even access that link with an account.

Some parts of the website are explicitly login-only, yes. I sometimes tend to follow link to gh from my mail on phone where I'm not logged in and found that e.g. you can't see any CI results without logging in.

It basically already is. You can’t use the search logged out and my agent can’t fetch issue comments.

[dead]

It's the new scraping tax. The delicate balance of the open web is completely broken right now because platforms are getting hammered by bots. Sometimes i wonder how long before the entire internet ends up behind a mandatory login or a paywall just to protect server bandwidth?

I really appreciate that HN still just uses temporary rate limits. You get the occasional "sorry" text, but as soon as traffic drops or your IP changes, you can read without logging in.

I wish more platforms stuck to temporary rate limits instead of building permanent walled gardens.

Fine so far with closed source

Depends on what you mean by login wall. They are, technically, behind a login/auth wall as you can only make 60 requests to their API per hour. Scrapping these days is extremely challenging as defenses do in-depth checks on your browser to make sure you are a "real" person.

If you need to just offer free access to your open source repo, gitea is a nice alternative and super easy to self host. Github also has the community, which you lose, true, but it depends on what matters more to you. I can help you setup gitea really fast if you're interested

I mean, I'm guilty too. Claude code scrapes everything in sight whenever I search for something.

I've written a small tool to query Github to see if a particular feature has been released for an open source project. I had to use an API token to not get immediately blocked. But I don't think rate limits are new for Github.

That’s a bummer honestly

Looks like that - and there are now so many alternatives.