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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

I have a GitHub account under my real name, but recently I've started using GitHub under a couple of other names instead. There's so much stuff you do in public on GitHub that I want to avoid people doing exactly this kind of analysis on.

I wish using multiple identities was at least some level of foolproof though. I have to be careful to configure my local copies of repos to use the correct username, masked email, and PGP signing key. It would be super handy if git had a global config of multiple identities and if I could have it prompt me to select one either when I clone a repo or the first time I push to it.

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note that this is technically against their TOS if not using paid accounts:

> One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine)

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

internet would be better with total anonymity.

That's one of my favorite parts of reddit. Accounts are just pseudonyms, and you can generate as many as you want. I personally generate a new one every few months, which helps keep too much identifying data from building up over time.

and they're all identifiably attached to your metadata package(s)

Which, at the very least, isn't public to everyone. So, not perfect, but better than single public account.

Not sure I follow.

it'll be nice to have options

nostr is allowing for more options

and Jack Dorsey happens to have put up a 1 billion sats bounty to """Create a “complete” Nostr-based suite of git tools, such that projects like bitcoin-core are sufficiently confident to move away from GitHub."""

https://bountsr.org/nostr-based-github/

They'll have to catch me first.

That's a term of service that I'm not too worried about. I'm not going to cry if they terminate those two accounts (main account is paid, so that's not in violation). And I'm not doing anything unusual or abusive with the accounts so I'm not worried they'll take action anyway.

You can have includeIf sections in your .gitconfig that applies only to things within a certain directory. So you if you create top level directories in your $HOME for your various identities, all you need to do is to make sure you are cloning into and working within the appropriate directory hierarchy.

I do this to separate personal and company repositories on the same machine, and it works flawlessly. An example config looks like:

~/.gitconfig:

```

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Personal/"]

        path = ~/personal.gitconfig

```

~/personal.gitconfig:

```

[user]

        email = {personal email address}

```

And you can have arbitrary numbers of "profiles" like this, as long as each is in their own directory.

Oh that's really cool! I'm absolutely going to use this technique. Thanks both of you!

Private repos are still off limits for this sort of analysis correct?

Microsoft owns github so draw your own conclusions on whether that's true and how long it will last if it is.

They should be, but those aren't a solution for anything where you want to share, collaborate, or even just ask questions on.

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