So who is this feature for? Those who have no interest in the social aspects of Github and want to use it privately. I'm sure that's going to be a minority.
Or people who don't want to use GitHub in the first place (esp. because of its less than appealing position on privacy), but they don't have a choice because it's the Facebook of the tech world and seemingly everyone else insists on it in order to get anything done.
I personally love this feature and have been waiting forever for it. Default to privacy over social features.
So they may not be electing in to the community you are describing.
Or they may have a different idea I’d what GitHub should be than the company did at the start or how you’ve described it.
Forcing public profiles may also a wee bit too close to zuck’s view if the world.
https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
In this instance we don't think it will hurt the social coding experience of open source and in fact might encourage folks who would otherwise be put off. But we are testing this particular feature and will keep iterating on it depending how things go and what the feedback is.
Namely, I'd like to be able to stop myself (the org owner) from inadvertently creating a public repo, or at least make it much more difficult to make that mistake.
I can do this for other users in my account (of which I have none), but not for myself as the org owner. I live in fear of clicking the wrong pixel one day and pushing private customer code to a "not meant to be public" repo.
Don't overstate it. Out of all the big social networks, GitHub's handling of user privacy is the worst by far. It took 1 1/2 decades to give a switch to toggle off the default behavior of "provide a public index of my activity across the site to anyone, even though I never asked for this (and was never asked if it was okay, either)". To really spell it out, what this means is that for its entire existence, GitHub has offered even worse privacy controls for what a user chooses to share about themselves than Facebook. For the longest time—until now—the only way to get around this was to regularly delete and then recreate your account (which is still an imperfect solution, not to mention labor intensive) or to disengage completely. Given the way that GitHub has positioned itself, it being even harder to avoid than Facebook has had a hugely deleterious effect on privacy for those who actually care about it.
This should have been table stakes 10 years ago.
As someone who's been subject to harassment based on info on the github profiles, this couldn't have come soon enough. Prior to this my only other option was deleting my account but if I did that the name would have been instantly re-registered by the harassers and used to impersonate me for harassment purposes.
if make your whole profile private this would exclude you from the network
GitHub has always been a social coding platform
i remember what happened when VK allowed people to make their profiles private
everyone just made their VK profile private and now you can't see beyond a person's name and avatar
which sucks, because it makes VK look like a ghost town
edit: why am i getting downvoted?