Show HN: Contribute to GitHub Anonymously

[livrasand]

https://github.com/livrasand/gitGost

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.

[KomoD]

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 → KomoD]

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.

[zahlman]

> 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 → zahlman]

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.