I assume they're preparing to follow the LinkedIn model by making access available to registered users only.
Have you noticed that GitHub has started blocking access to certain functions/pages for users without an account?
1. https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno/stargazers
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...
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.
When this started happening to me I realized that I can't rely on Github as infrastructure anymore. I now vendor all the repos I need.
Self-hosted forges like Forgejo make it pretty easy to mirror repos so you have everything locally. You don't get issues though.
Lucky you - search never seems to work for me anonymously, and even when logged in the search isn't great.
let's be real : it's microsoft.
I've put up with a lot of stuff, but this would be my personal last straw.
Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44876289 - August 2025 (97 comments)
At a minimum, you should be keeping hot copies of all contents of your repos currently hosted at Github, code, issues, etc. This could be in another svn system, or archive blobs in object storage you have full control over and can hydrate as needed into operating svn systems.
(risk management is my day gig)
I wasn't browsing /trending on github until I started using AI, wanting to see what cool projects people are working on.
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.
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.