The beauty of `git clone` is that there are copies of the repository on many thousands of hard drives (including mine -- last pulled a few days back). The main loss at this point is the metadata stored in GitHub's proprietary addons, like issues.

We can hope this inspires a) greater suspicion toward proprietary players that are sitting atop open-source work like GitHub (they're not the only one by any stretch); and b) greater adoption of systems that distribute the software's entire history together, including documentation and bug reports, e.g. Fossil.

I'm the Founder of BackHub and that's one of the reasons why we offer backups for GitHub repositories, incl. the metadata! Reach out for a discount.

If no-one else has anything more recent, would you be ok to put yours online somewhere for others to grab?

Turns out it's not needed. There are up-to-date ones already around.

eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24873953

And there is GitCenter, which is git over zeronet (a p2p network similar to BitTorrent but for dynamic content)

The code still in pypi, you can still get it from there

https://pypi.org/project/youtube-dlc/#files

Is there alternative to github? Feels like there should be. One that isn't regulated, a wild west for lost code so to speak

Try GitLab.

Or Gitea!

Do either store issues as objects in the repo itself?

Not git, but I believe fossil[1] does this.

[1]: https://www.fossil-scm.org/

Do you know of any systems that do this? Seems like a good idea.

I really like https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket for this.