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Did the whole pairdrop repo just vanish (github.com/fm-sys)
102 points by INTPenis on March 11, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments


I've been watching this thread for a couple weeks now and I posted it in the hopes of getting some attention.

It's sort of sad that small developers cannot get any help unless they go viral on social media.

But I also understand that any large platform must use automation to handle spam.


> But I also understand that any large platform must use automation to handle spam.

They do not. Certainly not the kind of automation that shadowbans accounts of long-term users without any kind of manual review. Stop making excuses for this kind of shit.


I’ve been saying for years, the only reason these kinds of online businesses are viable is because they are foregoing all the “human” services that they should be providing, and they can get away with it just by hiding everything behind machines and automation.

Why hire an army of humans to investigate and deal with spam when you can just auto-ban anyone your shitty algorithm says is suspect? And the only way they can get any recourse is to make a shitstorm on social media.

Welcome to the future.


I think we need to apply a part of the concept of "Human Rights" to corporate as well, namely due process.

Law is always evolving and this is one of these cases. One of the human rights is the right to a hearing. If the world is able to force corporate to give the right to a hearing to their customers, many of these problems will probably go away.

It's cheap for corporate not to provide a hearing but potentially disastrous for affected customers.


These providers (Facebook, Instagram, whatever...) were already granted "immunity" under net neutrality acts, therefore they should serve everyone equally...


Relevant comment from the original author: https://github.com/fm-sys/snapdrop-android/issues/356#issuec...


This is concerning. The possibility that a company’s livelihood could disappear, only rebuildable by reassembling the bits found on developers’ local Git clones. And then having to spin up new Git infra, rebuild all the pipelines, etc..


One of many reasons to prefer self-hosted software


Pipelines should be simple, if you have all the logic in scripts/whatever as part of the repo.

But rebuilding on another host is not the hard part. Rebuilding the community (and issue tracking etc.) is much harder. Especially since github pretty much dominates that aspect.


Probably not the same problem but we have seen a lot of dev accounts being flagged since they started gating code search a few weeks ago.


Marking this so I will read the article but from the comments.

Please keep backups of all your data, source code included.

If your company fails because {{online service}} lost all your data it is your fault not theirs.


After now getting time to read the thread. Don't take my sentences as any negativity towards the dev in the thread, it is meant more generally.

Please keep backups of your data, your backup does not need to be full git history etc... Even just a zip export of the current state every now and then although just a full dump of the repo is small enough for most repos.


For anyone reading this and wants a web3 100% uptime and uncesorable/un-deleteable data please hit me up (not free but not a scam... also less than 3 dollars a month for 100 gygabYtes of storage...)...


> If your company fails because {{online service}} lost all your data it is your fault not theirs.

No. It is your fault because it is expected and preventable but that shouldn't let the online service provider get off the hook. It's their fault too.


I didn't want to write an essay but yes, they should be held accountable but it absolutely shouldn't end your company.


Quoting the alt:

> Nope. It's outrageous but 20 days after creating the ticket, support has yet to answer it. I'll definitely move ship next week.

Doesn't surprise me one bit. GitHub's support was pretty much non-existent even long before Microsoft's acquisition. My memory may be a bit foggy, but about a decade ago the only way I was able to resolve my issue was by literally interviewing someone from GitHub for an article and mentioning my issue to the person I was interviewing.


What would be an ideal method to backup and/or auto-sync your Github Account(s) -- personal, work, etc? How are you doing yours?


Self hosted Gitea will mirror a repo for you - I'm not sure on an entire account though.


If I can guess - someone did actually try to hack into the user's account, and github locked the account as some sort of automatic measure; and as github automates most of the human support, it's really impossible to do anything.


The account is not locked, it's shadowbanned.


So, if you want to DoS a user, is just as simple as that? Leverage GH against the user?


Pretty much just spam failed login attempts works for almost every big tech corp account.


I don't say it's good, it's just my guess what happened.


If it’s hacking it has to be more than an attempt in order to shadow ban the account.




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