What's going on with bincode?

⚓ Rust    📅 2025-12-15    👤 surdeus    👁️ 5      

surdeus

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This post was published 33 days ago. The information described in this article may have changed.

(This is a cross-post from Reddit).

In August, the bincode GitHub repository was archived, pointing users to the new sourcehut repo:

This repo has migrated to sourcehut as its primary development hub. Go there for any future code updates.

This decision was made for multiple reasons, but the primary one was Github's rampant and inherently immoral integration of generative AI. Bincode and its authors have never and will never support this. If you have a problem with this we encourage you not to contact us about it. If you feel generative AI is not a problem, do better.

This is fair enough; other people are choosing to migrate away from GitHub for similar reasons.

However, there are some weird circumstances surrounding this migration:

  1. The commit adding that to the README was made on August 15 by "stygianentity", a user who joined on...August 21? OK, you can backdate Git commits, but the repository was archived on the 15th as well.
  2. "stygianentity" has seemingly no online presence to speak of.
  3. There's been absolutely no activity in the bincode SourceHut repo since the migration. They have also not added an issue tracker or any mailing lists (SourceHut doesn't do pull requests), so there is no way to report bugs or submit patches. This is especially weird since there is a "Usage Manifesto" in the README mentioning "PR/issue descriptions", which hasn't been updated for SourceHut.
  4. There has been no communication from any bincode maintainers in the only remaining avenue of communication, the Matrix chat.
  5. The Git commit history from the original bincode repo on GitHub was completely purged. It's been rewritten to a single commit from Aug 15.
  6. And this one is really eyebrow-raising: the commit history on the SourceHut repo has been completely rewritten. "stygianentity" seems to have taken the repo migration as an opportunity to mark themselves as the author of many past commits.

If the maintainer of a package wants to migrate to a different website, or write a manifesto about who's allowed to contribute to their repo, that's one thing. In this case, however, they've created an entirely new online identity with no established presence, rewritten the commit history of a very popular crate while migrating it to a new platform, changed the repo from being controlled by the bincode-org organization to their own account, completely emptied out the old commit history to the best of their ability, and disabled the issue tracker and provided no way to submit patches.

bincode 2.0 also depends on two new crates, virtue and unty, owned by the bincode GitHub organization. Those crates have not yet been archived or moved to SourceHut, and their status is unclear.

Even if "stygianentity" has no malicious intent, it seems hard to trust bincode now. I'm not sure what's going on, and by creating an entirely new account and rewriting the commit history, they seem to be trying their hardest to avoid answers and be as anonymous as possible.

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