Show HN: Contribute to GitHub Anonymously

(github.com)

3 points | by livrasand 10 hours ago ago

4 comments

  • KomoD 10 hours ago ago

    It says it makes the PRs with gitghost-anonymous but it's gitgost-anonymous without a h. the typo seems to be everywhere.

    Also realistically speaking, no project is going to accept a PR (beyond the most basic typo fix) with no information at all. You can't provide any info in the PR, you can't discuss the PR with anyone, you can't change it.

    A throwaway account makes much more sense than this.

    Also if you are going to reply to me, please don't use AI, thanks

    • livrasand 10 hours ago ago

      Good catch on the typo; you're right. It should be gitgost-anonymous (without the "h"). It's my mistake, and I'll correct it in the documentation and examples. Thanks for letting me know.

      Regarding acceptance: I agree that many projects don't accept important collaboration requests without context or discussion. GitGost should allow adding a good contextual comment.

      And I think that will be resolved soon, depending on the issues.

  • zahlman 10 hours ago ago

    > gitGost strips identifying information from your commits and creates pull requests on your behalf.

    Can't you just set up a pseudonym and throwaway email in your local git config?

    • livrasand 10 hours ago ago

      That’s a fair question, and for some cases a pseudonym + throwaway email can be enough.

      The main difference is that git config only affects a small part of the metadata. Even with a pseudonym, GitHub still receives and exposes: - Commit timestamps and timezone - Correlation across repos and long-term activity - Client and workflow patterns - A persistent GitHub account (even if “throwaway”)

      gitGost operates server-side and normalizes everything before GitHub ever sees it. Commits are re-authored with sanitized metadata and PRs are opened from a neutral bot account, so there’s no persistent identity to correlate over time.

      The goal isn’t just pseudonymity, but reducing long-term traceability and cross-repo linkage, especially for people contributing in sensitive or hostile contexts.

      That said, if someone is comfortable with a pseudonym and doesn’t need stronger anonymity guarantees, local git config is simpler. gitGost is meant for the cases where that’s not enough.

      Appreciate the question.