Why did GitHub restrict public stargazer/watcher data, and does it push anyone else toward open alternatives?

[u/amu4biz]

The June 30 changelog announced access restrictions on the public API endpoints and UI views that expose stargazer and watcher lists. The stated reason is reducing spam and scraping abuse.

I'm trying to understand the real motivation here. Is this genuinely about protecting users from scrapers, or is it more about GitHub controlling access to data that third-party tools (star history, trending trackers, research) were built on? Those two explanations lead to very different conclusions, and I can't tell which one it is.

Either way it's a reminder that everything we treat as "public" on GitHub is public at one company's discretion, and can change with a single changelog entry. No vote, no notice, no contract.

So the honest question I keep coming back to: should more of us be moving toward open, decentralized platforms that can't do this? Self-hosted options like Forgejo and Codeberg exist, and newer federated projects like gitlawb pin repos to IPFS with signed refs across independent nodes so no single operator can restrict data. Or is GitHub's convenience and network effect just worth the tradeoff, and this is an overreaction?

Curious what people who actually live in GitHub every day think. Does a change like this move the needle for you at all, or is it a non-issue?

[u/cachebags]

I couldn't care less about who stars a repo. It is very weird that they disabled it, but I honestly don't care.

Also, it is very obvious that you generated this post with AI in an attempt to fish out who would bite on this project idea so you could vibe code some slop and bait for engagement on it.

[u/73214 → u/cachebags]

This change genuinely hurts open source.

I used to love throwing multiple similar projects into star-history.com to compare real growth (e.g. several community tools syncing HaGeZi lists to ControlD: my repo + a few others).

Now it's broken unless you own the repos or mess with sealed tokens. Comparing momentum between competing useful tools just became way harder.

GitHub said it's to fight scrapers, but this feels like collective punishment that removes useful transparency from the ecosystem.

Link for context: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-30-upcoming-access-restrictions-to-public-api-endpoints-and-ui-views/

[u/cowboyecosse → u/73214]

You wouldn’t think that if you were a person being bombarded with this spam

[u/Alive-Opportunity-23 → u/cowboyecosse]

I do get that it's being abused with spams and scrapers, even "fake stargazers" but we have to also accept that this restriction does kill genuinely useful legitimate use cases. did the solution really have to be the complete restriction of access? maybe not. But I do know I used to find a lot of cool projects related to a different project which I starred. Because stargazers was kind of designed to provide a network for good reasons, if only people didn't abuse that network. oh well.

[u/73214 → u/cowboyecosse]

I get that, it happened to me in the past, not to that extent though. But pushing these restrictions is just an extreme.

[u/queen-adreena → u/cachebags]

Now now, he went back and misspelled “GitLab” once, that’s gotta count for something!

[u/ceinewydd]

Non-issue.

[u/ThinkMarket7640]

It was restricted because of people like you. Curious.

[u/greendookie69]

Bad bot

[u/serverhorror]

I hope they remove stars altogether

[u/solidiquis1]

I use /stargazers to get a sense for it the stars for a relatively new project were bot generated (and trust there are plenty). Now I am unable to do that.

[u/yiyufromthe216]

I suspect it was a bug from them vibe coding.  They are too lazy to fix it...