Yeah, fuck Microsoft. They haven't changed at all.

For example I remember when they held monopoly in a browser market and purposely broke their sites for other browsers.

Now the IE is gone, they have Chrome based Edge and are doing it again, if for example you try to use their office and make Teams call in Firefox it will refuse saying you should use Edge or Chrome. I'm guessing they are now trying again to claim they support another browser in case of antitrust, but Edge and Chrome is essentially the same thing. They just want to kill Firefox.

Apparently, this change was in 2016 - before MS bought them. However, I agree with your point. But the proof of that isn't in restricting search to logged in users. It's in how they ripped off FOSS code (esp GPL code) for training copilot. They did something that fundamentally damaged the roots of FOSS activity.

searching across all of github was made to be logged in then

repository level searching though is relatively recent. Heres the blog post about the change dated in June this year https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/

This comment by an employee in the thread also calls out it was in 2023 and links to the blog post

I’m getting so exhausted with the constant outrage in every goddamn feed in my life.

I have been able to search logged out within a repository, up to this year. I think what you are referring to is search across all repositories. That was indeed disables a while ago. But things did change this year, unfortunately. So yes there is a legitimate and new issue... Once more.

Oh is that why I can't seem to figure out where the damn search function is anymore? That's legit been driving me nuts for a few years.

lol? That must have been a half ass attempt on your part because GitHub search is fantastic.

Yeah. Right now GitHub is the only choice for my work to be seen; but someone is going to fix that by adopting activity Pub.

I'll run my own instance once that's an option.

Someone please correct me if it's already in play and I've just missed it.

The last part is happening. A lot of people switched to gogs/gitea/forgejo instances like codeberg when GH pulled a copilot on them. Lemmy went from being an obscure platform to a good one with lots of new users, better codebase and loads of clients when Reddit screwed its users. Mastodon was already healthy, but ballooned in size when twitter was trashed by Musk. YouTube is the only platform standing without a viable alternative, but people are trying after their adblock shenanigans.

Are the big proprietary platforms dead yet? No. Did they lose the audience - only a little bit. But it has made the alternative open platforms healthy and stronger. We are no longer in a condition where big platforms can just screw their users knowing that nothing will happen to them. Each transgression will cause more and more people to migrate. That's a good thing.