Why would you want this though? Your multiple git accounts are not the same identity.

SSH treats the key as password, you can have the same authorized key associated with multiple accounts.

Not sure why you choose to look at the key as identity.

SSH treats your key as evidence of your identity.

You can choose to give the public half of your key to multiple entities to allow them to verify your possesion of the private half of the key but that does not translate into multiple identities.

Not sure why I can't get my point across. It's simple really:

Can you use the same ssh key to ssh into different accounts on the same system?

Ah I see, yes, you're right.

The main way I've found this to be annoying is GitHub "Deploy Keys"[1]. They treat them similar to users, so you need a unique deploy key per repository. That is pretty annoying when trying to authenticate something like a CI server.

The main alternative is "Machine Users"[1], which are actually normal user accounts. That means they have the same policies as regular users, like mandated 2FA for an organization. And to manage them you have to log-in as that user. That makes it a pain for a team to manage a Machine User.

GitHub really needs to have Service Accounts that belong to an organization, and can be managed by admins of the organization (without having to log-in as the Service Account). The Service Accounts should be able to have SSH keys and API tokens associated with them.

[1] https://developer.github.com/v3/guides/managing-deploy-keys/

I was once told explicitly by GitHub Support (just as a reminder) that one person having multiple accounts is against their TOS, so there’s that. (This was years ago, not sure if TOS has changed in this aspect.)

The same person creating separate accounts for automation is explicitly permitted however: https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu...

Their Terms of Service (https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...) say: One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).

I was told by GitHub Support less than a month ago that in order for Actions to trigger other Actions I'd need to make a new separate account with repo access and have them act using its PAT.

I have one free personal account and a paid account for work. So I don’t think it’s against their TOS

wat

Never heard such a restriction even mentioned, let alone enforced.

Well you just heard. At least they say “we do not recommend creating more than one account” at the moment. https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu...

Enforced — of course not (guess why I was told), but it stands to reason that they probably won’t add a feature to facilitate TOS violation.

GitHub is not what it used to be when this "restriction" was made. These days, where a lot of companies decide to go with github, it's not uncommon for people to have one personal account and one work account.

This becomes messy to manage, as it's not easy(as far as I know) to use the same account on your personal PC to do both personal and work work.

Wont't work since the user is identified by his public key on the ssh level.