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Show HN: Contribute to GitHub Anonymously

https://github.com/livrasand/gitGost

3•livrasand•2h ago

gitGost allows anonymous contributions to public GitHub repositories.

It removes author info, email, timestamps, and opens PRs from a neutral bot. No accounts, OAuth, or tokens required.

Built in Go, open source (AGPL-3.0), with abuse prevention via rate limits and validation.

Feedback welcome.

Comments

zahlman•2h 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•2h 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.

KomoD•2h 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•2h 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.