Bitbucket is already a hot mess, but today was the last straw.
As always, I’m super busy. I’m trying to do a thing, as quickly as possible, just get it done, so I can move on to the next thing on my overwhelming to-do list. I have absolutely no patience for things that get in my way.
Well today I made a couple fixes on a certain project, committed them to git, and tried to push to the repo, which in this case was hosted at Bitbucket. Push failed. Nothing pisses me off more than thinking I’m done and about to start something else, when at the last minute I see red in Sourcetree and have to stop to read some fucking error message.
Apparently, they disabled “app passwords” and are forcing everyone to switch to “API tokens”. “App passwords” were the thing they forced me to switch to a couple years ago after they disabled regular user/password logins. (And the “app password” was just a long crypto-random string, in other words just a password with somewhat higher difficulty.)
Fuck this shit. If I have to change my password on every repo one more time, I might as well just move them once and for all.
I go to login to Bitbucket in my browser. I put in my email & password, and it then sends a verification code to my email. I hate that shit. (I’m so fed up with forced 2FA… I’m perfectly happy to accept the risk of choosing my own unique, strong password… leave me the fuck alone! I digress…)
After passing the dipshit 2FA code, it logs me in and takes me… to somebody else’s workspace. This is another annoying thing Bitbucket has been doing for years, ever since somebody granted me access to one of their repos ONE TIME, Bitbucket now permanently takes me to THEIR workspace all the time, instead of my own. I have to manually switch to my own workspace, where all MY repos are, EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME.
As if I needed any extra motivation to move away from Bitbucket, I just got it.
I’ve used Bitbucket for over 10 years, although at this point I was down to just a handful of (mostly older) projects there. A long time ago I started putting some things on GitHub. I liked that it was super convenient, but if my memory is correct, originally only public repos were free there. I had a lot of private repos too and I didn’t want to have to pay GitHub. So I put my public ones on GitHub and my private ones on GitLab, where they offered free private repos.
Then at some point GitHub made private repos free, and I moved my GitLab ones over. GitHub was the better/sleeker/more intuitive product vs GitLab, and anyway it was super convenient keeping most of my stuff in the same place.
Then in 2018 Microsoft bought GitHub. I wasn’t thrilled with that, but I decided to keep using GitHub as long as Microsoft didn’t fuck it up. So far they haven’t, at least not much.
But… in the back of my mind there’s been something gnawing at me. I worry that someday Microsoft/GitHub will, either deliberately or by accident, make private repos public. Either they’ll decide to stop giving free private repos in an effort to make more money, or they’ll just get a bug up their ass and decide people shouldn’t have anything private. I don’t know. My trust is so eroded from being screwed over by enough online things over the years that… I just don’t trust any of them anymore.
At this point in my life, I sort of figure it’s only a matter of time before whatever product/service I’m using screws me over. Even the ones I like. That’s why — for years now — I’ve been gravitating towards self-hosted anything and everything. Because the only one I can trust not to screw me over is — me.
A couple years ago I found out about Gitea, which is basically the closest thing to GitHub you can get that can be self-hosted. I love it. I’ve been moving my repos to my own Gitea instance one-by-one for quite a while now. I’m able to create user accounts and delegate access for the people I need to give access to. It all works great, and I’ve had zero problems.
So, now all my former Bitbucket repos are on my self-hosted Gitea instead. Bye bye Bitbucket!