12mo ago

Stop using gitlab.com for projects - Credit card info required for new registrations

If your IP (and possible your browser) looks "suspicious" or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.

Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png

125 comments

I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they're only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.
Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.
- On a tangent, why are all of these companies pushing AI programming? This shit isn't nearly as functional as they make it seem and all the beginners who try it are constantly asking questions about why their generated code doesn't work
  
  We are in the hype cycle so everyone is going bananas and there's money to be made prior to the trough of disillusionment.
  
  It's their wet dream. Making software without programmers.
  Execs have never cared about the technology or the engineering side of it. If you could make software by banging on a pot while dancing naked around the fire, they'd have been ok with that.
  And now that AI has come along that's basically what it looks like to them.
  
  VC's and companies like OpenAI have done a really good job of propagandizing AI (LLMs). People think it's magical and the future, so there's money in saying you have it.
  
  Because it brings in mad VC funding
  
  the beginners who try it are constantly asking questions about why their generated code doesn’t work
  Because it ain't here to generate all their code for them. It's a glorified autocomplete and suggestion engine. When are people gonna get this? (not you, just in general)
  I use CoPilot myself, but if you have absolutely no idea what you're doing yourself, you and CoPilot will both quickly hit a dead end together. It doesn't actually understand what you want the code to do. Only what is similar to what you have already written or prompted for, which may be some garbage picked up from a noob on the web somewhere. Books and research using your meatbrain are still very much needed.
  
  Because greedy investors are gullible and want to make money from the jobs they think AI will displace. They don't know that this shit doesn't work like they've been promised. The C-levels at Gitlab want their money (gotta love publicly traded companies), and nobody is listening to the devs who are shouting that AI is great at writing security vulnerabilities or just like, totally nonfunctioning code.
  
  I'm hyped about AI assisted programming and even agent driven projects (writing their own code, submitting pull requests etc) but I also agree that it seems just too early to actually put money behind it.
  Its just so marginal so far, the UI/HMI has too much friction still and the output without skilled programming assistance is too limited.
- For my private repos, hosted on my home server, I moved from Gitlab to Forgejo (Git, artifacts and containers images) and Woodpecker for CI builds. Woodpecker is not as powerful and feature complete as Gitlab, but for simpler needs it gets the job done.

GitLab used to be awesome when it was the place to go after MS bought out GitHub. They had premium access for all public projects under a FOSS license and top-tier CI. Then as time went on, they began pulling support for various functions in a very Microsoftian EEE sort of way. First requiring credit cards fir new users to access the CI, then taking away the CI almost entirely except for a practically useless monthly allotment, then taking away the premium access for public FOSS licensed projects. If I were migrating today I would not have chosen GitLab, but it is where I settled after leaving GitHub and my projects have grown to depend on GitLab CI even if I'm now forced to run my own runners due to the extreme nerfs they've done to the hosted CI. I mirrored OpenRGB to Codeberg, but since the CI pipelines depend on GitLab I don't see Codeberg becoming the main hub anytime soon unless they can execute GL CI configs. Sad to see how far GitLab has fallen though, it is unrecognizable from what it used to be as far as support for FOSS prohects goes, especially given how GitLab itself started as a FOSS project.
- Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. - Wikipedia
- Maybe it's time to start listing the enshittification phase of a project on Wikipedia or something.

Fuck GitLab. I used to use it until recently moved all my projects to codeberg. Way better. GitLab is becoming more and more like GitHub.
- Forgejo ftw!
  Self hosting here, also with runners to create a complete ci/cd line.
- GitLab is becoming more and more like GitHub.
  Well, duh. That's the sales pitch: "Like GitHub, but cheaper."
  
  Except it's way more expensive than GitHub. They jacked up the prices pretty hard. Now it's like $15/contributor for private orgs, and it's like $5 on GitHub for the same and more features.
  
  I think github is the cheap knockoff if anything
- For some people with less tech knowledge with git hosting, what's the (remaining if any) advantage of Gitlab if alternatives like codeberg exists?

Maybe it's just me, but I never liked GitLab in the first place. The UI is just awful to me. Searching through issues, before posting a new one, is just a pita.
- Pita = Pain in the ass
- The best part of the Gitlab UI is when it gets upgraded and you have to relearn how to find everything.
  
  What, did they source their developers from blender?
- I last used it seriously like 7 or 8 years ago and it was fine. I put it on par with GitHub at the time. The ability to self host for free without too much trouble also really affected my position on it.
  I haven't really enjoyed the few times I've had to use it in the last couple of years, though.

They been doing this for years. Here is a GitLab forum post about it.
As a gitlab user myself, I prefer gitlab over anything else because of their CI/CD. The free compute units run instantly now, no more queues orwaiting. A couple years ago, my pipelines would timeout after 3 hours.
- That post is only in regards to the CI feature. But today, even basic registration requires personal identification. You cannot even report bugs on open source projects without

I created a GitLab account long before they implemented this, but never used it. Went to post an issue related to self-hosted GitLab on their issue tracker, and it told me my account was banned. I wrote an email to support and they essentially said "an automated system identified your account as a bot and banned you during an account clean up some years ago to cut back on malicious users". I informed them that this was not at all reasonable, as I've never even posted anything on any GitLab account, and that I would be advising my organization to never pay for any GitLab product or service unless legal writes up the contract terms, because I have no faith in them as a vendor.
Seriously, fuck GitLab. And if anyone from that org wants to discuss this with me, they can pipe their email to /dev/null
- That is regrettably not too unusual. Many platforms deactivate / ban empty accounts that were inactive for a long time. I guess "aging" accounts before use is something not too uncommon for bots.

Discourse, Git* and more really need federated search.
It is already hard getting Contributors for projects, even more if you are on some random selfhosted server that nobody finds and everyone needs to create a new account for.
- https://forgefed.org/
  
  Cool!
  
  I hate that projects name themselves "fed" as that word is permanently associated with, well, feds.
  "Welcome to the Fediverse, we got pigs of all kinds"
- Good idea
- Gitea but integrated in fediverse

Can anyone else confirm this? As a long time user and champion of Gitlab, this is a deal-breaker for me.

Like others, I had an account before this was implemented. I have a couple projects on there, also mirrored to self hosted gitea. Have had people refuse/unable to contribute to the gitlab project due to the kyc requirement, so I'm thinking I will migrate to codeberg soon.

To add a few more details: After trying several times with different IPs and different browsers, I was able to register by providing only a mobile phone number once. Since that still requires personal information, this is still a very questionable process. (not to mention it took me a day to not be asked for a cred card)

Do what should I use?
- https://codeberg.org/
  
  I would LOVE to switch to codeberg for work, but my work requires that all data be hosted in the US, so I recently pitched GitLab as an alternative to GitHub, even though it's not perfect.
  
  What's your experience like with this? I'm seriously considering Gitlab & Github alternative.
  
  Or sourcehut
- If you want people to contribute to your project, Github is by far the best. If you're off Github, it reduces your visibility by a lot.
  
  You can host your project anywhere you want, setup mirroring to github and drop a link in its description. So you'll have github visibility and won't depend on github. Addiitional repo backup is a bonus.
  
  Truth
  
  Even just for reporting issues, anyone who is capable of identifying a bug is likely to have a GitHub account. Not so for Gitlab or others.
  Then you've got seamless integration with Vscode as a bonus, it's more like why would you not use GitHub unless you have a specific problem with them.
- Drew DeVault created https://sourcehut.org/, which may be worth considering.
  Also @thejevans@lemmy.ml
  
  Looks cool. Their hosted service is still in Alpha, so I doubt my work would go for it.
- I have no idea what everyone is on about.
  Host your own git repo. It's trivial and built into git and you make every decision about it from the ground up.
  For example you don't need to worry about registrations or what country it's hosted in because the country it's hosted in is your hard drive (or your company's server rack).
  Then use whatever front-end you want and point it at that private repo.
  It's only mildly more fiddly to set up and grant access, but it sure doesn't ask you for a credit card and it sure doesn't get scraped to train LLMs (unless you make it internet-facing and don't protect it).
  If you want to stay close to the core experience but still have a decent interface, check out (heh) gitweb and git daemon. Though I wouldn't mind if gitweb had some of the fancier features, like the "download as zip"/"git clone path/to/branch copy-to-clipboard" buttons.
  
  It is not trivial to host a git forge with modern features that allows easy collaboration between anonymous users all over the world.

No worries, gitlab is a trash Ruby on rails app anyway 😹
JK I do love gitlab, sad to see the corporate takeover. What features dont you get with the foss version? Can't figure it out amongst the marketing cruft. Seems like it would be relatively easy to build another hosted gitlab provider.
So why does gulab need to kyc anyway? And if it's a legal requirement, won't GitHub do the same?
- Is KYC a thing outside finance?
  
  It will be if digital ID rolls out with CBDCs.
- This isn't KYC, it's "prove you're a human".
  
  I guess gitlab is just the first to realize that captchas don't cut it anymore

Tried to register with gitlab three times some months back to file a bug against qemu. It rejected my registration silently every time (as in, it appeared to take it but never sent a confirmation email, not even one that got mistaken for spam). I gave up on filing the bug.

Screenshot: https://removed/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
For LW users after scumbags used image hosters to spread childprn:
- I probably will move to other inctance eventually. Probably to lavander.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/security/identity_verification.html
What the fuuuuu

Policies like that are almost entirely about minimizing fraud and harassment. It really sucks for people who don't have mobile phones that support authentication texts or whatever (since, even as you pointed out, the requirement is mostly a phone number) but it also drastically cuts down on fake/harassment accounts.
- It's about data harvesting and selling not safety or any other mentioned.
  
  Gitlab was getting attacked with thousands of spam accounts. Trying to fix the damage almost killed the company
- Even Github does not require any personal information, so there are certainly other ways.
  
  And Github is Microsoft who need those capabilities for basically every other website they sell.
  Whereas gitlab is REALLY good software with... a website nobody ever really asked for but that still needs to exist to sell people that software.
  This comes up with a lot of services. I think everyone lost their god damned minds when overwatch added phone verification?
  Like, I don't like it. But I have friends who ahve had to deal with harassment campaigns against their products (or persons) and the like and get why you would do what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask as a way to remove sock puppets.
- It's disgusting.
  It should be illegal to require any personal information unless you can prove that it's literally impossible to provide your service without it, and always illegal to share that information with anyone (but a payment provider exclusively for verification purposes) for any reason.
  
  It is still legal unless you are in EU.
- User flagging works too
- Credit card, blood ~~sacrifice~~sample. BuT tHiNk Of ThE kIdS!

This is wild 💀

I stopped since they put a broken cloudflare config in front of it that puts me in an infinite loop so I can't ever log in

Gitlab always sketched me the fuck out.
- It's a lab full of gits, after all
- Because it was usable software or because they're devs and can't spell for shit? What skeeved you out a decade ago that still persists now (i.e. 'always') ?

Remember seeing this a while ago. Is this something they're still doing or did they backpedal?
Edit: Oh wait, it's affecting OP. I apparently can't read.

Gitlab when they successfully created artificial dependency and can then demand money for even the most basic of services:

Edit: that's the owner of gitlab ffs
- https://www.thesoftwarereport.com/gitlab-ipo-makes-founder-sid-sijbrandij-a-billionaire-fueled-by-devops-and-remote-work/

Stop telling me what to do! You're not my mom.
- Don't be so sure about that my son

Funny you mentioned it, till very recently they needed validation by android or i-phone app, assuming all linux/FOSS programmers had one.
Beyond that anonymity becomes impossible for phone registrations.
Gitlab is NOT free software, and neither is GitTea, but Forgejo IS
codeberg and git.disroot use Forgejo not gitea
https://codeberg.org/api/swagger
@vivi
Ohhh.. github is just git.microsoft
- Gitlab EE is not a free software but gitlab CE is. Gitea is a free software too. However if you want to stay free, you have to self-host your instances. Even if it is forgejo.
  
  A for profit corporation will never produce anything truly free, it is all done in the name of profit
  IBM's systemd Qt Oracle Google Facebook are all multinational corporations.
  Nothing BUT free, they are all dictatorships for the people they employ.
  @bizdelnick
- till
  'til
  
  https://www.dictionary.com/e/til-or-till/
  Till is sometimes seen as a misspelling of ’til, but that’s not the case. It’s actually a separate word altogether with a variety of meanings, one of which means the same exact thing as ’til.

125 comments