Today has been exhausting. Yesterday, Gitee banned all image hosting repositories on its platform, and unfortunately, I was affected too.

Looking at the blog I had built, seeing all the images broken, I felt terrible inside.

From last night until today, I wrote 3 emails - 2 to the official team requesting them to lift the ban, and one to the admin of the Gitee technical exchange group. I also tried to join the technical exchange group listed at the bottom of Gitee’s homepage at least 20 times. Around noon today, I even called the pre-sales and after-sales phone numbers listed at the bottom of Gitee’s homepage. It took 4 or 5 attempts before someone answered, but that customer service representative wasn’t even in charge of this area.

It wasn’t until after 2 PM today that I finally got into the Gitee technical exchange group. After joining, I privately messaged the group owner and all the admins, but received no replies. It wasn’t until after 3 PM that an admin came out to address the situation.

I was happy about the image hosting being unblocked, but I was too lazy to change all the image links. So I privately messaged the admin, asking if they could avoid banning image hosting repositories again. The admin then shared their predicament.

The main issue is that Gitee doesn’t have much money. Unlike GitHub, which has Microsoft - a global tech giant - as its backer.

Gitee was created by OSChina (Open Source China), which certainly doesn’t have the financial resources that Microsoft has. Being strapped for cash is understandable.

After hearing this story from the Gitee technical exchange group admin, you’ll understand. In short, image hosting consumed too many of Gitee’s resources, affecting the experience of paying users who deployed projects. Since Gitee isn’t meant to be an image hosting service, they decided to ban image hosting.

Gitee’s positioning is as a DevOps platform - a development and operations integration platform. The definition of DevOps is shown in the image below:

I can understand their predicament, so I won’t criticize Gitee too much for this.