GitHub Sucks
My GitHub account was suspended without notice and two weeks of silence later, Wisp 0.1.0 lives at wisp.ar0.eu instead. Own your stack.
In between downtime when GitHub is actually "working," I post all of my projects and code there publicly (if it's not super private or niche). I do this because I love showing my work off and having a centralized place for all of it. GitHub, however bad it is, gives a very generous free plan and is popular among developers and employers. That is why everyone has a GitHub: not because it is a superior Git or social platform, just because it's convenient.
The alternatives are not great. Developers either post their code to another platform, or don't post any code at all and keep it local. Not only is that a disadvantage to the developer, there is also no real proof any of it was made. Say the domain for a developer's project expires and it's no longer reachable by the employers reading their resume; GitHub, however shit it is, provides a permanent home for that work, for basically free, while being bankrolled by Microsoft.
Bottom of the Barrel Customer Support
All of that might sell GitHub to you if you're a developer, and in 2026, for many developers and organizations, GitHub isn't just a portfolio; it's your career, your team's lifeline, and your business infrastructure. So it's not something that should be locked away and made inaccessible just because you tripped a bot detection sensor. But that's exactly what GitHub does: trip one and you can say goodbye to your account and code for at least a month, if not more. Everything on your profile just turns into a 404 like it never existed, and things you spent months, if not years, perfecting for the community are gone in the blink of an eye, without even an email from GitHub. Yes, GitHub doesn't even send you an email saying, "you tripped xyz, we are going to suspend your account until further notice." Nope, not even that.
So you open a ticket on their support website for account reinstatement and research more about this while you wait for a reply. "It can't take more than 3 days to get a reply," I naively thought. It's been 2 weeks now... and I still can't access or show anyone the code that was posted there. If you see a proxy I made for your project referenced somewhere and click the link, now it's just a 404. That might be fine for throwaway accounts, but I have many projects that people use for their business or their hobbies, and taking them away hurts not only my reputation but also my usefulness to the greater community.
I wonder if certain accounts get a whitelist; Torvalds must have one. I bet he would be a loud proponent of boycotting GitHub altogether. Aggressive bot sensors could even be justified if GitHub simply emailed the user and kept an open line of communication with them.
AI Is Not a Replacement for Customer Support
Microsoft loves to think they can replace their global support staff with AI trained on learn.microsoft.com and other slop "forums" they make (if you can even call them forums), requiring you to chat with that bot until it "can't solve your issue" before you can talk to a real support member... No, just kidding, that would be too easy. Here, mate, use this broken form hidden at some niche link, then wait 5 to 8 business days for a reply. It's no better on GitHub's support forum, where staff rarely intervene or answer questions, leaving the blind to lead the blind on those threads.
It is infuriating to sit there watching a glorified autocomplete parrot scripted troubleshooting steps back at you when your entire livelihood or open-source infrastructure is sitting behind a false-positive wall. These automated systems are completely blind to nuance. They cannot evaluate context, they cannot exercise common sense, and they certainly don't care that your production code or portfolio is currently throwing 404s to the rest of the world. Instead of spending billions training models to act as buffer walls against their own user base, companies like Microsoft and GitHub should be funding human operations that can review edge-case flags within hours, not weeks. Replacing actual human triage with AI chatbots isn't innovation; it's a cost-cutting tactic that shifts the entire burden onto the developer. It proves once again that as soon as a platform reaches monopoly status, your time, reputation, and livelihood mean absolutely nothing to them.
What This Means for Wisp
If you are wondering why I am writing about this: my GitHub account was suspended two weeks ago, and I cannot access or work on any of the code I had saved there. Not only has it hurt my businesses, it has also been a big demotivator, knowing I can't release my code to my audience and get full credit for it, posted next to my name and face on a big, SEO-optimized platform. I have still been programming and building, though. I finished the Wisp 0.1.0 pre-release and wanted to release it on GitHub, but since I'm suspended, all of Wisp's code lives at wisp.ar0.eu instead.
I absolutely adore Wisp. It's like having your own sourdough starter: sure, it takes some effort to make, but once it's made, you can craft beautiful, yummy things with it easily. That's the same reason people say "data isn't real unless it exists in three places." These companies don't owe you their service unless you signed a contract or paid them for something. Quite literally, all of my code on GitHub could be deleted and unrecoverable right now, and there is nothing I can do but wait for a response to my ticket and maybe code a little locally in the meantime. So self-host Forgejo now, before it happens to you; own your stack.
If I get unsuspended within a couple of months, I will continue working on Wisp and publish the full 1.0.0 release to GitHub (I want the credit and the history of me making this, for employment and other things). If I never get unsuspended, I will have to make my own Git provider that isn't a piece of corpo garbage. Or maybe I'll give up programming, move to Brazil, and start a dance studio or something, who knows...