Ghostty is leaving GitHub

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-leaving-github

by WadeGrimridge • 3 months ago

3521 1024 3 months ago

mitchellh.com

arn3n• 3 months ago

What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:

1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.

2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.

Perhaps it's a bit of both.

cdfalcon• 3 months ago

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

rstupek• 3 months ago

I'm curious if your graph had the number of projects its hosting shown as well?

PunchyHamster• 3 months ago

It started being bad after MS.

It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI

celestialcheese• 3 months ago

Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

Reason077• 3 months ago

GitHub claims that AI development tools have caused a massive surge in demand in recent months. They need to scale by 30X to keep up with demand.

According to GitHub, Azure migration is the attempt at a fix/upscaling, not the underlying cause of the issues.

Addressing GitHub’s recent availability issues: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...

An update on GitHub availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

dgb232• 3 months ago

I glanced at zhe thread you linked. And as I understand they are in the process of migrating, which will take more than a year still.

If that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily a problem with Azure itself.

Nemo_bis• 3 months ago

Azure also regularly has incidents due to capacity issues in several regions, so that many Azure-managed services also go down. Some of those incidents have been open continuously for many months now.

btown• 3 months ago

Coupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github's abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure.

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

ergocoder• 3 months ago

OMG I was a few FAANG-like companies. Most acquisitions failed due to the migration. It always played in the same way:

1. The acquired company was small company to the acquirer. 2. We need to improve scalability and reduce cost!

Then, they migrated. The new system was worse and didn't have parity. It was years. Customers were moving off. The project/product shut down.

mirekrusin• 3 months ago

Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?

cyberpunk5• 3 months ago

I mean I know we all love to shit on azure, but I don't think it's partially unavailable for 3 hours a day on avg over the last 3 months?

mnau• 3 months ago

Azure is not the best, but it mostly works. GitHub gets only 98% reliability for git operation component, reading and committing. This is the most basic component. The fact they are not on this 24/7 and it isn't fixed is the result of a culture (=what is prioritized, what quality is accepted).

alexxxxxxxxxx• 3 months ago

I would say uptime and UX/UI:

uptime:

Incomplete pull request results in repositoriesSubscribe Update - We are actively reindexing the remaining ElasticSearch indexes. Our priority is ensuring correctness and avoiding further impact. We are taking a measured approach to safely backfill data and will share additional updates as progress continues. Apr 28, 2026 - 15:58 UTC Update - After yesterday’s incident, we are investigating cases where /pulls and /repo/pulls pages are not showing all indexed pull requests. This is because our Elasticsearch cluster does not currently contain all indexed documents.

No pull request data has been lost. As pull requests are updated, they will be reindexed. We are also working on accelerating a full reindex so these pages return complete results again. Apr 28, 2026 - 14:51 UTC Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Pull Requests Apr 28, 2026 - 14:17 UTC

maxvisser• 3 months ago

Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have

carlos-menezes• 3 months ago

I'd add a third point: record service usage.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

sureglymop• 3 months ago

It interestingly shows how a centralized system may just fail or become too flaky at unprecedented growth.

I suppose it's a bit too on the nose to point out that git is decentralized and itself doesn't really suffer from this, nor need it.

IshKebab• 3 months ago

Yeah if those graphs are even vaguely accurate there's really only one explanation: vibe coders pushing previously unimaginable amount of slop.

I would not be surprised if Github has to stop offering so many services for free.

marginalia_nu2• 3 months ago

We don't have a labeled y-axis so their record usage could be a 5% increase for all they're showing us.

arianvanp• 3 months ago

And yet GitHub has felt the most dead it ever did. Less quality contributions. Less feeling of community. All the open source projects are struggling.

They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive

tfrancisl• 3 months ago

#2 makes #1 a big problem. AI-generated code is fine if you have thorough engineering practices around it. Are they blindly merging in AI generated code without review? Maybe. Thats an issue of engineering practices, not of the use of generative AI in general.

saghm3• 3 months ago

Yeah, this is what I was going to say. These two theories are not mutually exclusive, and there's an argument that they're casually related

campbel• 3 months ago

It's been on a downward trend before agentic coding took over. I suspect it's a mix of Microsoft culture and Microsoft infrastructure. It's starting to feel about the same quality as other Microsoft services.

Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.

dijit3• 3 months ago

I suppose there's a reason that most Microsoft development shops tend to vendor their dependencies as a culture.

Gamedev being the most prominent that I have personally witnessed.

EDIT: Why are you booing me, I'm right.

bayindirh3• 3 months ago

Note: I'm a graybeard coming from SVN era.

GitHub took a massive hit in credibility when it got bought by Microsoft. We are a burned generation, we have seen the worst of Microsoft. This created a massive crack in the foundation of trust for most people.

Then Copilot happened. Some people dug how the training is done, and one GitHub employee responded by mail that every public repository including GPL repositories are included (the relevant Tweets are deleted unfortunately). The created crack has deepened. Some of us (incl. me) left GitHub.

As Copilot entrenched, Microsoft's product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub's code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they're doing & regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we're here.

GitHub's first enshittification cycle is over. Now we're starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon's decay from relevance phase.

It'll be a slow decay. It won't fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.

spindump8930• 3 months ago

Any more context on the copilot training note? More pointers would be very interesting, but we'd need to keep in mind how many different underlying models were (are?) branded as copilot. I thought at some points the "copilot" model in autocomplete contexts was a finetuned GPT from OAI.

Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.

SwellJoe6• 3 months ago

It began pretty much immediately after the acquisition. There was an uptime chart making the rounds a while back, and less than a year in, the all green data points of pre-Microsoft Github turned to lots of red. I assume brain drain, as everyone vested or otherwise completed their contractual requirements and cashed out. And, Microsoft has never had a great reliability culture in their cloud services, so no in-house talent to effectively take over.

kqp• 3 months ago

Well, it started just after the Microsoft acquisition, when AI did not exist, and coincided with news of Microsoft fully ingesting the GitHub team and forcing architecture and priority changes, and has steadily continued since. So idk, it’s a mystery. Maybe it was caused by the thing that did not exist when it happened. Microsoft just posted on a PR blog that it’s the thing that did not exist, and they’re famously truthful, open, and altruistic.

pluc3• 3 months ago

If you've worked with Azure you don't need to be explained what the problem is. I'll believe that workloads are different now than they were some years ago but... they literally are the cause for it so no sympathy from me there.

fridder• 3 months ago

It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company's proxy screwing with HTTP/2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I'm nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.

tedivm2• 3 months ago

It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc.

Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.

I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.

1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

yetihehe• 3 months ago

Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.

pathartl2• 3 months ago

Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.

kivle• 3 months ago

Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.

unclejuan• 3 months ago

The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.

If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.

fabiensanglard• 3 months ago

Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day.

https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25

gen2203• 3 months ago

In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is.

If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.

https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical

Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.

zuzuen_1• 3 months ago

Wait, this is insane! And the method they use to classify an outage seems solid as well. Imagine being a Github dev working in this environment.

_doctor_love6• 3 months ago

insider perspective on this

I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.

Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.

superxpro12• 3 months ago

Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!

thinkingtoilet• 3 months ago

This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.

bsimpson4• 3 months ago

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.

As so often happens, that didn't last long.

Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.

I'm sure there are countless other examples.

theappsecguy• 3 months ago

Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.

mvkel2• 3 months ago

GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters

Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?

slopinthebag2• 3 months ago

It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.

worldsavior• 3 months ago

Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.

ngrilly2• 3 months ago

I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.

kps3• 3 months ago

CA (where software goes to die)

CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.

HumblyTossed2• 3 months ago

Everything becomes the numbers game.

Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.

jbxntuehineoh• 3 months ago

literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?

tedivm2• 3 months ago

Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.

pyb2• 3 months ago

They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

valleyer• 3 months ago

Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.

tick_tock_tick• 3 months ago

All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional?

GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.

thom2• 3 months ago

While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.

jim334422• 3 months ago

Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.

ZeWaka• 3 months ago

Mostly the Actions outages, but yes.

sevenseacat2• 3 months ago

A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don't load. Or PRs literally don't appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It's a daily occurrence to play the 'is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?' game.

Oh, and don't forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the 'new experience' and the 'legacy view'. You just can't trust it as much anymore.

SCdF• 3 months ago

Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can't ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.

bonoboTP7• 3 months ago

So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.

dark-star• 3 months ago

crumble as an organization

I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub

HumblyTossed2• 3 months ago

Microslop only really cares about the enterprise customer. Those are slow to change, so once they're in github, they'll stay forever.

s-y• 3 months ago

i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle. It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios

mday27• 3 months ago

wow, I knew it was bad but I was gaslighting myself a bit. 0 9's is crazy.

jen20• 3 months ago

I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this

I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.

rgbrgb• 3 months ago

I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months. We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).

what a cliff hanger!

As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.

tommica• 3 months ago

Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!

preommr• 3 months ago

past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X

Is it really this bad?

I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.

cyberpunk5• 3 months ago

Yes.

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

94 incidents in 90 days.

AlienRobot3• 3 months ago

It's not always you see a status page so colorful...

anon7000• 3 months ago

Yeah, we use GH heavily at work (not so much GHA for critical workflows, thank god). They have an outage that breaks our git operations once a week at least. Like, webhooks not delivered, PRs not showing up, git operations not working, API issues… and that’s not counting GitHub actions which we only use for noncritical workflows

varun_ch• 3 months ago

I don’t know if it’s production ready yet, but tangled.org is a really interesting take on a forge and I’ve been watching it for a while. It decentralizes the centralized parts of GitHub in a pretty neat way. The biggest problem with forges that aren’t GitHub is people need to make and manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute (which almost certainly will lower the amount of people who do. Maybe this is a good thing these days though...)

Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.

charcircuit2• 3 months ago

But a tangled account doesn't solve the problem of needing an account on those other forges. You just added one more account someone needs to make.

nerdypepper• 3 months ago

maybe, but tangled knots actually federate. you could contribute to repos on knot.ghostty.org and knot.tangled.org with the same account. no other platform permits one identity across instances.

vvill• 3 months ago

I'm also closely following Tangled's development. Their two biggest weak points: lack of private repositories and ux design (which I don't have a problem with but I've seen many people mention) are both being worked on. Atproto is developing a permissioned data segment to the protocol, and Tangled just hired a designer. I'm excited for it.

cedws3• 3 months ago

manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute

For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.

xswhiskey• 3 months ago

Possibly in a few years from now we'll get actual data about how many outages we've seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for "AI everywhere".

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

I'm sensing a trend

atonse3• 3 months ago

During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.

And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."

There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.

I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.

MarsIronPI6• 3 months ago

I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.

Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".

Cthulhu_• 3 months ago

Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea

NewJazz5• 3 months ago

Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.

palata3• 3 months ago

Sourceforge???

gamander• 3 months ago

AtomGit

estimator7292• 3 months ago

I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.

It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/

It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.

skydhash3• 3 months ago

I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges.

Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.

mamcx• 3 months ago

The problem is that Github does a lot.

However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.

In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.

fragmede5• 3 months ago

Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?

toastal2• 3 months ago

Xit has a better “take” on Git. Pijul & Darcs still have better fundamentals.

Hendrikto3• 3 months ago

But how much of that do people actually need? Most users don’t use most features. The core MVP is not that big.

user342832• 3 months ago

Does it do anything that GitLab does not?

With what I heard about GitHub Actions, the GitLab CI pipelines should be much better.

Not that I haven’t shot myself in the foot with GitLab pipelines on numerous occasions.

nkotov• 3 months ago

It does a lot but at the end of the day, if the core functionality is just not good anymore, maybe put all the side projects on the actual side and focus on how to make sure core functionality suck less.

For example - We adopted GitHub Actions, then we swapped it out this year. Our own primary use case is code hosting + PRs. We want it to talk to the other (better) tools that intended for their use case. We want it in a secure yet fast and available manner. Nothing else. I don't care about projects, issues, or whatever super app they're trying to become.

zaphar• 3 months ago

Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.

bigstrat20033• 3 months ago

Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.

bsimpson4• 3 months ago

The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint.

If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.

znpy3• 3 months ago

Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.

zacmps• 3 months ago

I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.

ec109685• 3 months ago

He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.

egorfine• 3 months ago

GitHub should hire him to be their CEO

And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.

pluc3• 3 months ago

- "Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess"

- "Uuh, no"

Be a pretty quick story

kelnos5• 3 months ago

GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.

Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.

contact9879• 3 months ago

the issue is where to go?

codeberg, self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, still-beta sourcehut, tangled? github was “the git community” and now it’s fracturing—you need accounts everywhere, you can’t easily discover neat projects

i like tangled if only because it’s built on atproto which emphasizes ownership and transferability of identity: something that would make the move off github so much easier

midasz• 3 months ago

n=1 but i don't really discover new projects via github, it's mainly here, reddit, or via colleagues. then again, i selfhost forgejo so don't have a real presence on github

planetafro• 3 months ago

Self-hosted Gitlab is great. A lot of the US government uses this via bigbang if familiar. Designing things with an "airgap" in mind and control of your services is paramount in today's AI rush of slop.

sudb4• 3 months ago

I'm very interested in where ghostty ends up - I wonder if they'll follow Zig to Codeberg?

It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!

There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.

DANmode5• 3 months ago

It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!

In what way(s)?

sudb4• 3 months ago

As in, to present themselves as the new defacto git host, capitalizing on GitHub's actual + perceived lack of reliability

zapnuk• 3 months ago

GitLab? We use gitlab for work. Its way worse in comparison.

Last week I encountered a bug where my merge request simply didn't show that I deleted a file. Apparently it's because my MR included the creation of a folder with the same name as the basename of the deleted file. Unacceptable for a code hosting platform.

Other than that I miss GH Actions, a clear ui (gitlab has way too many sub-menus), a responsive ui (gitlab feels very sluggish). And while we don't have the Gitlab duo activated, it still pops out regularly eventhough I can't use it besides closing it. ...and I don't even want to start with their issue buard.

It strongly reminds me of Jira in terms of quality, which is no compliment.

madamelic• 3 months ago

At least it isn't Bitbucket.

I think Atlassian and Microsoft are genuinely in a competition to see who can make worse software and still have customers.

amai3• 3 months ago

Gitlab is written in Ruby on Rails. Don‘t expect to much from it.

ursuscamp• 3 months ago

Maybe Ghostty will follow Zig to Codeberg, but it doesn't seem like a fit to me.

hamdingers• 3 months ago

Would love to see it become more common for projects with sufficient inertia to host their own forge like GNOME or Inkscape do. Could be a service that foundations like CNCF or LF offer to their projects.

packetlost• 3 months ago

Same here. I'm mildly optimistic tangled will go somewhere and be a viable replacement

jonpalmisc• 3 months ago

Eh, I kinda hope not. Codeberg's latency even for just browsing is pretty bad (in my experience) and also is only sporting a single 9 of uptime [1].

I wish Codeberg the best, but I thought it was a questionable choice for Zig and feel similarly for Ghostty—doesn't seem like a strict improvement.

[1] https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg

preisschild3• 3 months ago

Tbf its free software and the quality will go up the more people are using it and contributing.

eddythompson803• 3 months ago

Well, that page took 13 seconds to load for me :/

mitchellh• 3 months ago

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).

Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.

We've been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.

I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

teach• 3 months ago

Anyone who makes fun of you for feeling things probably isn't anyone you want to listen to, anyway.

Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.

DrammBA2• 3 months ago

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it

This quote from the post resonated with me:

I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

(Needless) complexity is going on.

KISS and you sleep better.

That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)

Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.

GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.

realo• 3 months ago

Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...

No AI needed at all. Only humans.

frevib5• 3 months ago

Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.

ngruhn• 3 months ago

It's move fast and break things.

Induane• 3 months ago

Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse.

Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.

palata3• 3 months ago

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it

I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.

And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.

munificent3• 3 months ago

it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.

Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.

My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.

psychoslave2• 3 months ago

The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.

Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.

Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.

piker• 3 months ago

Do you think this is endemic to large software organizations today, or are our needs (and the corresponding complexity) just outstripping the ability of old business models to address it?

aapoalas• 3 months ago

"They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."

steve_adams_863• 3 months ago

I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that's so antithetical to where my career began and what I thought was possible. I want to believe we can do better, and ideals can still matter in software.

And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.

fourside• 3 months ago

People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.

bayindirh3• 3 months ago

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).

No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.

I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal.

For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.

pdimitar2• 3 months ago

Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid.

Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.

For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.

Not everyone can do it. Respect.

klaussilveira• 3 months ago

I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It's the meaning behind it: the hacker spirit, the naive curiosity, the juveline freedom, being destroyed by the corporate machine. It is a small metaphor that hits all of us in different spots.

And boy, does it hurt.

rtaylorgarlock• 3 months ago

Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (except maybe github actions, which seems to get 10x the attention it deserves); the challenge is I perceive far better solutions to be chosen which would serve the open source world if we simply deploy a slight increase in cognitive energy.

noir_lord2• 3 months ago

There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.

I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).

pocksuppet8• 3 months ago

Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you're crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.

woolion• 3 months ago

KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system. For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn't work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...

theideaofcoffee• 3 months ago

Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', then there are 10 different competitors ready to take over, and I hope some of them do. Better for the ecosystem to have a strong element of competition. Perhaps their time as top dog is ending, and it's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.

saadn92• 3 months ago

Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you're emotional about it says more about how much you gave to that platform than anything else.

Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!

ssgodderidge• 3 months ago

So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me:

Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year

How could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?

rvz2• 3 months ago

Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn't and ever since Microsoft took it over, it was just run into the ground.

I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.

The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

jadbox• 3 months ago

What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?

dantihanyi• 3 months ago

It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.

If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.

ziml77• 3 months ago

You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.

Imustaskforhelp• 3 months ago

Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.

Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)

You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.

my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.

I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.

idan9• 3 months ago

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.

It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)

My version of your post reads differently:

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.

I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.

In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.

I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.

spaceribs• 3 months ago

Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?

The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

devin• 3 months ago

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.

My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

fcoury• 3 months ago

Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.

jrochkind17• 3 months ago

I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.

It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)

ahartmetz3• 3 months ago

You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s

brailsafe• 3 months ago

Fyi your HN description still says Heroku

Lammy5• 3 months ago

In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.

Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.

willio58• 3 months ago

The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.

So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.

bbor• 3 months ago

What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.

“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)

margalabargala4• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.

It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users.

There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

stock_toaster2• 3 months ago

  > My version of your post reads differently:  
  > "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
  > Walking away would be easy.

Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.

Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!

Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.

mylons• 3 months ago

github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.

the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.

mritchie712• 3 months ago

looks like you work at github.

I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.

section_me2• 3 months ago

As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.

biggoodwolf• 3 months ago

"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.

vpribish• 3 months ago

fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.

rao-v• 3 months ago

As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".

Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).

mmooss2• 3 months ago

Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.

I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.

Occam's razor applies here

I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.

gwittel• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.

All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).

If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.

pushcx• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.

You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.

So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?

zhynn• 3 months ago

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.

I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.

But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

deaux2• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.

It does not deserve to get better.

It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.

Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]

GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.

You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...

mh-• 3 months ago

I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.

Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.

Good luck, and we're all counting on you.

(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

codesnik• 3 months ago

huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.

CalRobert• 3 months ago

The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

timcobb3• 3 months ago

Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.

cess11• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.

rglullis• 3 months ago

t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale

Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.

Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap

yeahforsureman• 3 months ago

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).

Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

pluc3• 3 months ago

This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.

leethargo• 3 months ago

I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)

jordemort• 3 months ago

I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.

Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.

An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.

golddust-gecko• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.

Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.

Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.

theojulienne• 3 months ago

I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.

Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.

I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.

Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.

zhiyan• 3 months ago

"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"

No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.

NewJazz5• 3 months ago

Spool of Wire Guy or Wiregate refers to a viral video of a man (named Dan) telling his wife (Cindy) that a spool of wire he's had for 40 years is almost at its end

The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy

satvikpendem• 3 months ago

I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It's annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they're reflections on years past.

ale• 3 months ago

Damn

oulipo22• 3 months ago

Tools can be frustrating. We can get emotional with tools we appreciate and we grew up with. But we should also learn to not focus solely on work efficiency. As you say yourself, this is unhealthy. You've labeled it, now work on fixing that unhealthy relationship with work, and with that tool.

Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day.

We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties.

Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc

denysvitali• 3 months ago

Nobody should cry over a SaaS

This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.

flowardnut• 3 months ago

"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."

Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing

WesolyKubeczek• 3 months ago

If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I'm very interested to hear about it.

Zenbit_UX• 3 months ago

Forgive me if you’re not in a solutioning phase right now … but how motivated are you to fix this?

I’m a big fan of ghostty and also unenamoured with the current state of GitHub and Microsoft.

That is to say I believe this is an opportunity to disrupt the incumbent player and I’m game. HMU if you feel similar and want to discuss.

rajangdavis• 3 months ago

Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?

_doctor_love6• 3 months ago

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).
I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing.

Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.

koolala4• 3 months ago

God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow

jenadine• 3 months ago

So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan.

Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?

dismalaf• 3 months ago

GitHub died when MS bought it. It was great back in the day, it shaped a lot of modern day FOSS culture but now it's just MS.

heliumtera• 3 months ago

No serious person would make fun of this emotional reaction. It seems technology had something going on, and it quickly got flooded by incompetence and greed.

We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology. I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here.

Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.

aucisson_masque• 3 months ago

I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.

Dinux• 3 months ago

No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked.

I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.

flaburgan• 3 months ago

I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook. And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years. So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.

johnbarron• 3 months ago

This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-)

"Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

"I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."

anildash• 3 months ago

It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.

deadfall23• 3 months ago

Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D

ozim• 3 months ago

I wasn’t that invested in StackOverflow but still I was quite invested there.

I do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it.

I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong.

Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place.

GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.

munificent3• 3 months ago

Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things.

We don't cry over things, we cry over what things mean.

I don't see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.

singingtoday2• 3 months ago

hug

Thank you for your hard work.

999900000999• 3 months ago

I feel this way, although less emotional, with Unity.

Unity taught me how to program and , along with JavaScript turned me from a college dropout to a software engineer.

Finished my degree later.

I still love Unity, but the company is stable. If I friend needs help with a Unity project, I'm down, but I start all my new games with Godot.

I'm not sad though. Unity is like a friend I'm still cool with, we just drifted apart.

But from a realistic point of view. Did we really think Unity and GitHub were charities in pursuit of the greater good.

Of course not. They cashed out, made money and whatever good they did along the way was a nice side effect.

linsomniac• 3 months ago

Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)

ok_dad• 3 months ago

I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life.

That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.

bavell2• 3 months ago

In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.

Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!

subhobroto• 3 months ago

You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!)

This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:

You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.

More importantly, Mitchell, you care.

Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.

esafak• 3 months ago

GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better

Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.

bittlesnet• 3 months ago

Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.

DetroitThrow• 3 months ago

It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public.

GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.

aforwardslash3• 3 months ago

We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade.

To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.

idebug• 3 months ago

I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.

listless• 3 months ago

I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you.

I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.

And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.

It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.

Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.

Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.

ianpenney• 3 months ago

I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016.

https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq

We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.

You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.

You sure did keep it up.

Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.

Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”

… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.

Still, keep it up.

devy• 3 months ago

I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message.

It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!

Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-git... [3] https://octocaptcha.com [4] https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw

xyst2• 3 months ago

the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.

thangalin• 3 months ago

I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

0x0000000• 3 months ago

I have an unhealthy relationship with it.

You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things.

Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub

This is addiction

bigstrat20033• 3 months ago

Yeah I agree. I'm not going to pick on someone for having an unhealthy relationship with a product such that they get weepy when it goes downhill. But I do hope he recognizes how unhealthy it is, and works to improve that.

napolux• 3 months ago

we can be ai-powered, we can be engineers.

but most of all we’re humans :)

happy to see that some humans can still feel emotions, real emotions, and not be ashamed by them.

Nate75Sanders• 3 months ago

Completely understand the work/life/hobby fusion.

And I think that you and GitHub went through the stages of life together. They probably weren't exactly parallel, but I bet you measure and remember your life through GitHub's life to some degree, along with the projects you had there.

There's no question that with your drive and acumen that you could build the GitHub that you both had and want. It might be your next chapter.

bfivyvysj• 3 months ago

Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?

crossroadsguy• 3 months ago

tears hit my keyboard

That is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).

On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.

PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.

justinator• 3 months ago

Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.

jasonkester• 3 months ago

I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused.

Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?

chapz• 3 months ago

It's probably not GitHub as such, but the associated memories and experiences. You never miss a place, you miss the feeling of happines you had when you were there, or the people you spent time with there.

People get emotional over a car, over a house, over a pet... you could argue for everything it's just a car/house/pet... you can get a new one.

traceroute66• 3 months ago

I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this

To be honest, the blog post is quite a lot of self-indulgent waffle. But I forgive you for that, "each to their own", as they say.

What I won't forgive you for is writing such a long blog post and then completely missing the bottom-line.

Do not write "I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months".

If you're going to make me read such a long blog post, then at least have an answer ready-to-go for the critical question that everybody is going to ask !

jappgar• 3 months ago

Better yet don't write the post at all until you actually do something.

"I'm going to become a vegetarian" vibes.

DrBazza• 3 months ago

I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.

Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.

If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.

Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.

bonoboTP7• 3 months ago

I'm a bit lost about the problem. Is it really about crying about outages? I'm aware of enshittification issues in the broader tech field but the post and this comment don't really say what the problem is. If this is supposed to be some kind of signal and wakeup call, more info would help. For context I'm a lightweight Github user for over a decade, mostly putting up personal projects without much collab, and opening issues in other repos when I find bugs, just cloning and forking stuff (mainly in the machine learning community, but also in general Linux tools). For me it works okay enough, compared with the overall landscape of SaaS. I'm not a fan, don't feel any loyalty and my expectations for user abuse from big tech are admittedly pretty abysmal by now. I'm just not seeing what specifically happened with github to trigger this.

jobs_throwaway• 3 months ago

Is it really about crying about outages

You mean being affected by the constant outages that make the product literally unusable? If you were doing any serious work with it you might understand.

myst• 3 months ago

Was it the platform or the people? The people would be out there doing things without GitHub and they will be there doing things without GitHub.

rafa___• 3 months ago

Dude, get some help

lopis• 3 months ago

Your emotions are totally valid, and I can empathize. You fell in love with a community that slowly got eroded away and no longer exists.

callamdelaney• 3 months ago

I thought you like worked there but with the additional context that you never did, yeah cringe

pikseladam• 3 months ago

chill dude

jjkaczor• 3 months ago

Naw I did the same after I got "piled" on at Metafilter a few years back, and after 18-years buttoned my account because I was sick of the toxicity (I am an ancient BBS/usenet guy from decades ago - I can handle "flamewars"). I am pretty "left-leaning" liberal, but the "purity tests", insular nature and extreme "wokeness" that place has turned into has basically ruined it. They have monthly meta discussions/threads on why they are losing attention/participation, yet they don't seem to recognize that they drive people away.

Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")

MilkLizard• 3 months ago

I don't have much of an opinion about Github, but I just want to add that your feelings are valid. It is not a stupid thing and I hope nobody is making fun of you for crying over it.

Take care.

hodgesrm• 3 months ago

I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.

alper• 3 months ago

The same thing happened to Twitter. All the online properties we used will be gutted and sunsetted eventually. The only thing we can do is move on and slash and burn a new pasture.

18 years is a good run as far as these things go.

renegade-otter2• 3 months ago

I don't think it's nostalgia or rosy retrospection. The youths never experienced the old, magical internet. All they get is algorithmic hell.

Forgeties79• 3 months ago

I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.

threethirtytwo• 3 months ago

People will comfort you about your emotions and your tears and then tell you you’re wrong to feel sad about it. They’re lying to you. Your instincts about how you feel are completely correct.

The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy.

I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.

kalcode• 3 months ago

Vagrant I used a lot early on in my career to learn Ruby on Rails in Windows. Thanks a lot for your work!

cush• 3 months ago

Do you know where you’re going yet?

strangattractor• 3 months ago

I love the ideas and motivations underpinning Github's creation. For a long time Github was the best instantiation of those ideals. Maybe not so much anymore. Transitions are always the most difficult but they often result in new perspectives.

pcarolan• 3 months ago

Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.

kgilpin• 3 months ago

One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.

chanux• 3 months ago

Here's the track for this moment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuNyMxLlVig

xinayder2• 3 months ago

It's not stupid to share your emotions towards a platform you've grown passionate of, especially when since Microsoft's acquisition, the platform has become enshittified, and now, vibe coded to an extent that there is not a single week where there are no issues with the platform.

alpha_trion• 3 months ago

I'm interested to see where you land the project at post-GH. The platform has just not grown in the ways I had hoped and their reliability has been a real issue for awhile now.

I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.

incognito124• 3 months ago

Not surprised, I think I was subconsciously waiting for this as Mitchell has been very vocal about Github on X. They killed a lot of developer goodwill, and I feel this is just a start of the mass exodus.

Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))

baggachipz2• 3 months ago

very vocal about Github on X

I really wish an open-source developer of his caliber would also migrate to a serious microblogging service which isn't so openly hostile to truth and civility. Ending the sticky network effect of an evil service starts with its biggest, most prolific users migrating away.

atonse3• 3 months ago

It's all about who you follow. My feed is mostly AI people, entrepreneurs and nerds. Some political stuff gets through, but otherwise, I'm glad to be back on X in the last few months (I left a few years ago in disgust over the insane politics because even nerds were only talking politics).

Karrot_Kream• 3 months ago

It's not about the technology, it's about the people. The initial people on your network matter. The moderators matter too. That's just a very different job than writing and shipping code.

ghthor• 3 months ago

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

mvdwoord• 3 months ago

I see your point, but the last few (services) that tried seemed to have become even worse?

martiuk• 3 months ago

I find the alternatives more likely to ban/censor than X. Bluesky is definitely not civil to those with the "wrong" opinions, despite what proponents of the service say.

r_lee• 3 months ago

he's not one of its "biggest, most prolific users"

moving away from X would just result in less visibility

WadeGrimridge• 3 months ago

Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub:

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168

latexr2• 3 months ago

https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168

CamperBob2• 3 months ago

The big idea is all agentic interactions should critically rely on GitHub APIs. Code review should be agentic but the labs should be building that into GH (not bolted in through GHA like today, real first class platform primitives). GH should absolutely launch an agent chat primitive, agent mailboxes are obviously good. Etc. GH should be a platform and not an agent itself.

Why do I want that running on somebody else's computer? It's bad enough that most developers already rely on Anthropic or OpenAI. What value does a remote working repo add?

cedws3• 3 months ago

I was expecting something more pragmatic than 'lean into AI even harder' to be honest.

GitHub needs to slow down with the AI shit and spend manpower fixing what's broken. Actions is a complete fucking disaster.

Also I have no idea what Pierre is but their website is horrible.

hocuspocus• 3 months ago

Copilot revenue goes to 0 if GitHub burns to the ground.

That's not remotely true. I doubt most Copilot Business/Enterprise subscribers care about GitHub at all.

dragonelite• 3 months ago

Inbe4 he will move to some agentic git product from vercel

VadimPR• 3 months ago

The question is where do you go?

JuniperMesos2• 3 months ago

I can appreciate Hashimoto's genuine feelings about Github, and the world of open-source software development that it opened for him and that he spent a significant chunk of his life participating in.

On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.

I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.

I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.

So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.

zhouzhao• 3 months ago

Agreed. His suffering comes from his inabillity to see the bad in closed source software. I lost my respect for him when he sold Hashicorp.

sho_hn2• 3 months ago

Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.

Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.

I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.

paulryanrogers• 3 months ago

GitLab cloud lost some of my projects. And it was (is?) quite slow. Props to those who can keep it running self hosted.

Andrex2• 3 months ago

Seeing KDE and Gnome come together isn't exactly uncommon but it still warms my heart reading about it.

alphabeta3r56• 3 months ago

Which features were moved? I would have thought required mandatory approvals would be the first ones to be moved.

dannyfritz072• 3 months ago

I have had my eye on these technologies for a while. Embedding the issue tracker and such in your git repo. Every day these make more and more sense.

- https://gitsocial.org/

- https://radicle.dev/

- https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

jbaber• 3 months ago

Exactly this. Even though I don't use git-bug anymore, I'm still a sponsor. I desperately want an issue-tracker-in-.git to become a standard.

Issues and CI are the only lock-in. The latter is legitimate because you're using someone else's CPU, but every developer has the tooling to "git diff" and write comments if we could just agree on a format.

BTBurke• 3 months ago

I made the decision to leave Github a couple months ago when I retired and started heavily working on personal projects. I like the idea of radicle and used it for a while, but it's complicated to set up and maintain if you want to run your own seed node and pin your personal projects.

What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.

A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.

https://kilimanjaro.io if you want to see what it looks like.

philipwhiuk• 3 months ago

I'm not a fan because it makes the change log mostly issue tracking and not actual changes.

Using a separate Git repo with a defined naming structure I could appreciate.

(e.g. gitrepo.org/project and gitrepo.org/project_issues )

Fizz43• 3 months ago

Radicle is such a cool concept and seems to be working great. The only thing it needs is a better way to search through the projects hosted on each node.

duxup2• 3 months ago

They're all just value propositions. Is it worth my time and money? There ya go that's it.

It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...

Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.

jdelman• 3 months ago

The centrality of GitHub was part of its appeal. It’s where you went to see where nearly every (obviously not all) open source project was being developed. Based on his post, the network effect was a large part of the draw and the reason he stayed despite reliability issues. A more federated set of git UIs will never capture the same feeling.

legobmw99• 3 months ago

I could imagine something like the mastodon protocol but for git forges, where even though they are separate websites there would be no true boundary to discoverability/interaction

ozgrakkurt3• 3 months ago

This is orthogonal imo. There are plenty of services that work really well that are closed source

xnx• 3 months ago

I've never understood the enthusiastic sharecropping for Github. It's a reasonable tradeoff to let Github own the public home for your code, but no reason to be happy about it.

munificent3• 3 months ago

I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.

I think that model works well when it comes to code, but I don't think the non-free software movement ever really figured out how to deal with services and data. Even if GitHub was completely 100% GPL Free Software... the user accounts and everyone's comment history and stuff lives on a database somewhere. The servers are running somewhere. That's where the community is.

Even if you could take GitHub and spin up your own fork running the exact same software, the community isn't there. The interactions aren't there, the history isn't. It's like building a clone of your childhood house and wondering why your young parents don't magically appear in it.

JuniperMesos2• 3 months ago

You're completely right. I care about the free software movement from an ethical/freedom-preserving perspective, and I do think that many facets of the movement are too grounded in the details of how personal computer software in the 80s and 90s worked, rather than in the question of how to import the user-freedom-perserving ethos to services and data.

The question of how to create free-software-mediated online communities that don't involve storing user identity and data in a company's private database is critical. The user database, and what can be built upon it, is the single biggest reason people do use Github despite its flaws.

tardedmeme12• 3 months ago

I don't think the community of GitHub matters as much as people keep saying here. I think each project has its own small number of developers, and getting all of them to move is much easier. It has a larger number of bug reporters and downloaders, who only interact with the project occasionally and are perfectly capable of doing the same thing anywhere else.

techblueberry• 3 months ago

On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.

Since we’re getting all philosophical, heartbreak isn’t inherently bad, it means you had the opportunity to love something deeply. Being engaged in the world means taking risks on things that might disappoint you. I do wish more of that love were directed at open source, but it’s not as if open source is without heartbreak and disappointment. Richard Stallman is sort of emblematic of someone who starts out with good intentions, but whose paranoid risk aversion probably put a ceiling on his potential?

underdeserver• 3 months ago

Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.

i_think_so5• 3 months ago

2026 - when you have to specify which catastrophic outage was the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted your migration.

basilikum• 3 months ago

I never had any positive relation to Github. Free software should be developed on free platforms. So I very much welcome this. Fuck Github. Every single outage Microslop vibe codes is a good thing.

But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me.

I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.

i_think_so5• 3 months ago

I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.

I'm with ya, but building services at the scale of Github, (even when it was a fledgling) requires resources and budgets that very few FOSS projects can even try for. So any replacement is essentially guaranteed to happen commercially.

The original git model enabled part of what was necessary for a fully distributed social phenomenon, but it didn't even go half way. None of the critical social aspects of Github were, are or will ever become distributed, now that a gatekeeper monopolist owns it.

If you want a true FOSS replacement, it's going to need to do at least an order of magnitude more prep work before launching. We've already seen what we get when somebody puts up a plain git server, and we've seen when a single company extends it to become social with a proprietary, non-distributed model.

A better future requires much, much more up-front work.

i_think_so5• 3 months ago

....of course less than 24 hours later I stumble across https://radicle.dev/ completely by accident. It's been in the works for years.

Well played, universe.

stratigos• 3 months ago

All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.

dueyfinster• 3 months ago

It is sad to see how far GitHub has fallen. Will also be interesting to where mitchellh takes the project, I imagine codeberg and sources are possibilities.

I looked up my own ID and GitHub join date from the API, all the way back in 2009: https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster

nextaccountic5• 3 months ago

To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.

A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.

Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)

senko2• 3 months ago

Maybe Mitchell will pull a Linus and, out of frustration, take a weekend off to write the distributed infrastructure for issues, PRs, actions, etc. around git.

oever• 3 months ago

It was 10 days, but that's fine too.

jancsika• 3 months ago

The most important part of Linus' project was day -1, when he sliced off all the chunks of work that depend on solving open research problems.

You don't want to start your Saturday morning declaring an _action struct, then filling the rest of the day staring at research papers about the current state of fast homomorphic encryption.

Zambyte• 3 months ago

https://radicle.dev/

jolaflow3• 3 months ago

Check out Epiq https://github.com/ljtn/epiq

It was born out of frustration and does just that. It is about to go v1 within days.

lucb1e• 3 months ago

I didn't know of this, that special ref mechanism sounds really cool! Thanks for the protip

alienbaby2• 3 months ago

We've had trouble with git and repo's that have used non standard refs. It's all fine and fancy until we wanted to use some tooling that works with git, except it wouldn't see our unusual refs, and because they were non standard they were effectively hidden unless you knew they were there. So the migration work (almost) silently lost 10+ years of old work that was hiding away under those non standard refs.

stryan2• 3 months ago

git-bug is great but it doesn't handle PRs nor does it have a method for users without commit rights to submit bugs to the project. I know they're working on the latter (something with the web UI?) but until then you still need some kind of public infra for issue management if you want the general public to be able to submit issues.

I use it for my project[0] to keep issues centralized with the repo, but I still use Github Discussions as a pseudo-bug tracker to let random users provide input. If it's a bug I add it to git-bug and sync it to Github issues for public viewing[1], but if you want use bug reports that's not really going to work.

[0] https://github.com/stryan/materia

[1] Ironically I got this workflow idea from ghostty and mise, both of which require users to submit bug reports as discussions first and only generate tagged issues once an actionable bug is determined.

nextaccountic5• 3 months ago

For me the main issue with git-bug is that they are not dogfooding it. However, it's also one of the few projects that is actually trying to solve the core problem, rather than skirting around it. (well I now learned of radicle in this thread and they seem to store issues in git and even have PR support I think)

Twirrim• 3 months ago

Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)

I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).

It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.

chungy2• 3 months ago

Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo.

Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.

Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)

0xbadcafebee3• 3 months ago

Even if you only used raw git with GitHub, it still wouldn't work. Pushing changes from my laptop would fail for hours when their SSO would break.

casey2• 3 months ago

It's definitely time to turn these loose web features into a real program. I don't understand the desire to clone github as a website. It's demonstrably 10,000x more work to maintain github.com than a "github" command.

samuell• 3 months ago

There is also epiq, which is a bit more bleeding edge but has a more powerful UI story, being a TUI app, providing an issue board in the terminal:

https://github.com/ljtn/epiq

nextaccountic5• 3 months ago

Oh that's interesting!

Does it have bidirectional tracking with Github? (if I create or comment on an issue in Github it will be reflected on epiq, and if I create on epiq, some bot will post it to Github). For me this is the key feature.

Also

The system is designed to assure robustness and uses a number of techniques and design patterns to avoid merge conflicts.

I think the docs should describe this in detail.

Anyway maybe ask him to post this to HN some day!

sergiotapia2• 3 months ago

Github was not built for a world where its userbase quadrupled and are pumping in generated slop at non-stop pace.

DANmode5• 3 months ago

So not their problem.

sergiotapia2• 3 months ago

Is their problem, but have some grace. You wouldn't be able to handle this insane growth either.

ozgrakkurt3• 3 months ago

As a former user, I couldn't care less about their slop growth as I have no stake in them growing their slop.

It doesn't work if it doesn't work.

cmrdporcupine• 3 months ago

I'm not sure how we ever could have expected GitHub to continue with or add quality when being built by the same company that also builds MS Teams. There are clearly the wrong quality levers at work inside Microsoft.

Yes, it seemed like Microsoft had a brief interregnum period of about 10 years where they seemed to have a renaissance and a genuine culture change and a concern for quality and initiative seemed to take hold.

And for many of us who came into the industry in the 90s this was a strange period because actually post-Gates/Balmer MS suddenly seem not so bad?

But that was until the first deals with OpenAI and the first round of layoffs. After Musk's purges at Twitter, MS was the first to really join in the fray.

Since then the old MS is back. Clearly as Machiavellian as in the past. But kind of sadder and more pathetic.

But honestly I'm also a bit confused by the framing some people have this thread because I remember GitHub always having reliability issues in its early days. It and Twitter were both famous RoR projects with notorious and constant outage issues in the 2008/2009 time-frame.

Rapzid5• 3 months ago

Teams has introduced substantial improvements over the past couple years..

deaux2• 3 months ago

Ah yes, after a decade of being one of the worst pieces of software with 10M+ MAU, literally only gaining market share because of monopolistic bundling practices.

So bad that if a startup had made Microsoft Teams they would've gone out of business after a year.

But the substantial improvements!!!

oybng• 3 months ago

The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition

scottyah• 3 months ago

Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.

alienbaby2• 3 months ago

there are plenty of enterprise github users. Where I work currently has an internal github and uses external github.com to host public facing OSS work.

stabbles2• 3 months ago

Is "migration to azure" or "microsoft acquisition" a cause or a symptom?

I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.

lostmsu• 3 months ago

Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.

OtomotO2• 3 months ago

I find that so fascinating... I know GitHub since decades.

Over said decades I've worked on countless (open source) projects there.

Professionally? 1 project in all those years. Yes, exactly 1 (still there).

Every single other project was either in bitbucket, gitlab, gitea, forgejo or... I am sure I forgot some forge.

What I am trying to convey is: fascinating how "everything is on GitHub" is a very american way to see the world.

sgt• 3 months ago

Ironically, I was thinking that the Github downtime is an American view in and of itself. For us living in the European time zones, Github is hardly down during our business hours. It's mostly down during US business hours, then demand is highest.

slekker• 3 months ago

I could recommend trying out source hut!

senko2• 3 months ago

On a much smaller scale (niche personal projects), I'm also planning to leave Github (probably for a local forgejo or even gitweb).

The vast majority of features GH offers are of no use to me. In fact, in the age of vibe coding, zero-friction drive-by contributions are a net negative. The UX has been steadily dropping for years. The recent abysmal record in availability and bugs is just the last drop in the bucket.

The writing was on the wall the day they were acquired. They had a good run, but those days are long over.

BigTTYGothGF• 3 months ago

During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub.

I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.

oulipo22• 3 months ago

Agreed. Tech-bros think this is a flex. But at some point americans need to recognize when they have a unhealthy relationship with work, and with consumption.

Because this is affecting the planet, our social ties, and everything else. And it's having impact on all of us indirectly

thombles• 3 months ago

I didn’t read this as a flex. More a rueful admission of his connection/addiction to GitHub.

arionmiles• 3 months ago

Upvoted for the username

maxclark• 3 months ago

"The timing of this is coincidental with the large outage on April 27, 2026."

This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.

velcrovan2• 3 months ago

To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.

Yet again, I wish the prevailing SCMS were more like Fossil, where issues and forum posts, at least, are part of the repository (and everything lives in a single sqlite file). (Of course Fossil actively opposes "pull requests", separate issue)

chungy2• 3 months ago

(Of course Fossil actively opposes "pull requests", separate issue)

Not opposition, but very little incentive for the primary developers to implement the feature. Fossil's own developers happen to be the same as SQLite's developers, which doesn't accept outside contribution as a policy. It results in Fossil's features being predominantly, but not exclusively, the same features needed for SQLite and little else.

This thread discusses avenues for implementation: https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/ce238fccfd6b124d

velcrovan2• 3 months ago

I’m aware, I was one of the people who commented on that thread!

LelouBil• 3 months ago

The downfall of GitHub is sad, having a centralized way to find cool open source software is amazing. I use the feed of what people I'm following are starring, tags and code search to find amazing and interesting projects, and I'm afraid I'll be missing out on great but hidden software since there is fragmentation when people leave GitHub.

And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)

nickdothutton• 3 months ago

As an aside, I always wondered why GitHub had a web interface. Admittedly I’m a pre-web SCCS/RCS “old timer” but I wouldn't have put a web interface on it at all.

unethical_ban• 3 months ago

Managing just about any complex service is far easier in a GUI.

It's targeted from the beginning to the masses.

It's used for non-technical people too; for documentation, dashboards, and bug tracking.

Viewing all this data is far easier in a GUI than a TUI.

featherless2• 3 months ago

I migrated my entire workflow onto a personal GitLab instance after the whole "pay a fee to bring your own bags to the grocery store" GitHub Actions pricing shenanigans earlier this year.

Best decision ever.

100% uptime. 100% less stress with each of the product/pricing changes over the past few months.

Was also able to build my own GitHub Copilot equivalent that auto-reviews MRs interactively.

Highly recommend it.

colechristensen2• 3 months ago

Is GitLab pretty good these days?

I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.

shimman3• 3 months ago

Yeah, if you're hosting your own just use forgejo. Forgejo has a better governance model and is actually open source, not a corporate project that happens to advertise in open source. The distinction is meaningful.

cyberpunk5• 3 months ago

forgejo has been great for us. It scales remarkably far with the built in sqlite db also. Single binary, no deps. You ofc have the option to hook it up to a proper database server.

whalesalad2• 3 months ago

It’s a rails app from the early 10’s era think heroku dominance. therefore to run it you’ll need a dozen sidecars for things like redis or elasticsearch and others. it has all the fun ergonomics and bloated memory consumption of that stack as well. the all-in-one go based tools are probably better for a solo homelab style deployment (gitea etc)

featherless2• 3 months ago

I had steered away for a long while thinking it was subpar to GitHub, but it's really come a long way. Especially running it on a local network it's noticeably faster in every way than GitHub, and I'm able to build complex gitlab workflows with custom runners that are fully configurable and have effectively 100% uptime and no queues.

faangguyindia• 3 months ago

i am opposed to using anything which is not single binary and not using a sqlite db for self hosted things which don't need to scale to millions of users.

tempestnick• 3 months ago

This is not the large ElasticSearch outage they had on April 27, 2026. This blog post was written a week before that, so this was a different outage.

I have nothing to add to this. Comedy gold.

y0ssar1an• 3 months ago

pack it up. we're going to codeberg.

krainboltgreene3• 3 months ago

The unspoken reality of github: It would be significantly better both as a product and a vehicle in our economy if it was entirely worker owned.

pocksuppet8• 3 months ago

git is worker owned - unless the worker chooses to outsource its ownership

krainboltgreene3• 3 months ago

git is not a company, you're thinking of Github. Classic mistake.

erelong• 3 months ago

's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018

debo_• 3 months ago

GitHub literally getting ghosted

hmokiguess2• 3 months ago

GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

JamesFM• 3 months ago

This is assigning an unearned malicious competence to Microsoft

nimbius• 3 months ago

It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.

this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.

Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

artyom3• 3 months ago

Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.

Avamander• 3 months ago

but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.

LeCompteSftware• 3 months ago

FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.

Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.

As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.

It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.

pxc3• 3 months ago

This is a very HN take.

It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.

I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.

raincole2• 3 months ago

People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.

And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.

rafaelmn• 3 months ago

Is this even an issue these days ? I thought GSuite was good enough for most office work for a very long time now ?

Rapzid5• 3 months ago

Nope. I think all this is mostly virtue signaling and a bit of "GitHub derangement syndrome" in the water.

People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.

MH had a weird ass set of Tweets a month or so ago talking about GitHub needing disruption and how the UI was bad. Now it's "Not fun anymore".

I guess you die a hero or live long enough to be irrelevant and shouting at clouds like Stallman.

Work at a company on GH Enterprise. Outside those recent major incidents and a few spots here and there we haven't even noticed issues. It NEVER comes up on engineering or leadership meetings as an issue or risk. Not a single time has GitHubs issues come up as an agenda item. Yeah, YMMV but still...

Capricorn24812• 3 months ago

People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.

The writer of this blog post is Mitchell Hashimoto, and he has posted positively about AI, so that doesn't track at all.

The reason people are talking about it is because the decline is rapid. That's worse than the raw downtime. There's a sense that it will be even worse in a year.

I'm not a fan of AI everywhere but I have 0 reason to think this is from AI usage at Microsoft. Still, we talk about the issues a lot. We used to do our project management in GitHub. For whatever reason, projects don't work anymore. You can add an issue to a project and it won't show up. So we moved that part off of GitHub. That's too bad, I liked linking to issues.

If this happens enough, the only thing left will be hosting code, and we'll look at each other and go "we can do this anywhere"

nottorp2• 3 months ago

you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids

You think? They're still pushing the "native" Minecraft that isn't scriptable aren't they? And maintaining the fully moddable java MC against their will.

lucascdotnet• 3 months ago

First time I've heard Redmond used as a metonym for Microsoft

mkl• 3 months ago

20-25 years ago it was fairly common, and it never stopped, just faded gradually.

botanrice• 3 months ago

I know there is a complicated history here as well but I personally find VS Code pretty satisfactory for my needs and really appreciate that it's free.

Not sure if that balances out the burning fire of hate I feel for Microsoft Office but it's something.

aykutseker• 3 months ago

about to launch my first open source project in days. reading this with a knot. github used to be a default; now it's a decision. and watching mitchellh agonize publicly is the honest preview every new maintainer gets from now on.

ChrisArchitect• 3 months ago

An Update on GitHub Availability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422

eiiot• 3 months ago

This seems like a great opportunity for new platforms who are rethinking the OSS space to finally gain the traction they need to be effective. For a collaborative platform, quantity is key, and I am hopeful that someone who is interested in advancing the software space will become the new go-to. This isn't to say that GitHub hasn't been innovating, but at least from my perspective, the way we've used git for the past however-many-years has remained basically constant.

Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...

qudat• 3 months ago

Thanks for the callout: we’ve been reimagining code forges by making them irrelevant with tools and tiny services like: https://pgit.pico.sh (static site generator for git) and https://pr.pico.sh (pastebin for git collab)

They are still a WIP but it’s on our roadmap to continue to improve.

poidos• 3 months ago

Love sourcehut and want to see them succeed, but their build service (despite having some very cool ideas like allowing you to SSH into your build container) is pretty barebones / lacking compared to GH/GitHub actions. You either get no task parallelism (all your tasks are in one manifest) or you get up to N=4 parallelism (you have four manifests). As far as I can tell, you can’t specify job dependencies beyond just “when this job finishes, trigger this next job by deploying a manifest”. No build caching, and artifact sharing felt like a kludge.

mplanchard• 3 months ago

OTOH, the nice thing about a minimalist build system is it forces you to solve these problems yourself, in a way that’s broadly compatible with any provider: for me, nix builds, cache with cachix, and use gnu parallel for running concurrent jobs.

Means that my CI pipeline can be ~instantly moved to any provider, or a box that I own, or whatever.

microflash• 3 months ago

I’d love see Tangled succeed because it strikes a good balance of UX and features. Sadly, there’s no clear pricing story around managed solution. They are also VC funded so they can follow the “journey of VC backed org” anytime.

ramon1562• 3 months ago

Tried tangled, quite like the idea! The fact you can always switch to a self-hosted knot is nice.

I was looking to self-host forgejo but I didn't want to expose any SSH, and needing to be on a tailscale network just to develop also seemed flakey.

I'll stay on codeberg for now and check out tangled from time to time, because I think this is a good use of ATProto

mikeputnam• 3 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

bluegatty• 3 months ago

Best alternative list anyone?

butterlesstoast3• 3 months ago

I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there.

This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.

chrisweekly2• 3 months ago

Luke Wroblewski posted this earlier today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukew_small-taste-of-the-inco...

The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.

cyberpunk5• 3 months ago

There's no Y axis. It doesn't mean anything. There could be a 10% difference since 2023 for all we know.

sholladay• 3 months ago

Imagine if MS just did a git revert all the way back to ~2020. That was peak GitHub for me. We got some niceties the first couple of years after the acquisition - free private repos, Sponsors, secret scanning, a new mobile app and CLI - but things were still pretty stable, before their architecture and the little UX touches got destroyed.

What a timeline that would be. One can dream.

i_think_so5• 3 months ago

[flagged]

samtrack2019• 3 months ago

why not just setting up github enterprise? i mean it's still an infra to take care but if you are willing to pay for it, you may as well? from my experience the other git forge doesnt provide the same feature sets and api as github, like gitlab ci is actually pretty limited compared to GHA, there is no concept of github apps for other providers too, but maybe you just want a code hosting..

ghshephard• 3 months ago

We have both GHE as well as GH.com - and, i genuinely couldn't tell you which of the two blows up more often.

selectively• 3 months ago

GitHub is fine.

qsera2• 3 months ago

What I want to see is Linux kernel leaving GitHub...Always had a bad feeling about it being hosted at somewhere controlled by Microsoft..

jaywcarman• 3 months ago

Linux kernel source is hosted at https://kernel.org , not GitHub. You're probably thinking of Linus Torvald's read-only mirror[1].

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux

qsera2• 3 months ago

Thanks for the correction.

thomasfl• 3 months ago

If Github were shut down, it would feel even worse than if Hacker News was shot down. I am github user 1520. Signed up a just few days after Mithcel on february 2008. I remember the early days sitting in a hotel lobby next to Chris Wanstrath and discussing a bug I found on github. Not ready to do the switch yet.

arjie• 3 months ago

Github has been all right for me because I don't do too much collaboration and I prefer not having to worry about the security implications. But it just struck me that I have my own infrastructure on Tailscale. I could probably just use Github as an alternate remote and use my own infrastructure to store the code. I imagine a gix + axum + maud should be able to give me my own git web host.

The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.

I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!

_doctor_love6• 3 months ago

Reading the write-up again, this really struck me:

It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

Github is really Microsoft. The above paragraph captures perfectly what it's like to work in a big company like Microsoft.

When Github was a startup, it was both a tech company and a social media for coders and a real-life social scene (especially in SF, some pretty epic stories over the years).

Once Github was acquired, it was a countdown to all the soul being sucked out of it and simply a mechanism being left behind.

_doctor_love6• 3 months ago

Meta-observation: GitHub's quality is so bad that Mitchell has to clarify in his writeup which recent outage he is talking about!!!

ryanisnan• 3 months ago

This comment doesn't add anything novel to the discussion, but is worth adding I think because hubbers and MSFT folks read HN - I too am evaluating leaving personally. Professionally, we're talking about it loosely, and if it continues it will become an increasing likelihood.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub.

Well, he is not alone with that. Something isn't working - and Microsoft either does not realise it, or does not care. I think the microslop strategy consumed Microsoft internally; it seems unable to change trajectory now. It's like you are driving to a cliff, in a car but you are not the main driver. It's quite interesting to see though - people can now expect "which disaster will hit Github tomorrow".

On the other hand, I also think it is time that Github gets some serious competition. Gitlab is not that competition; codeberg also not really (they'd need to up the useful features by a LOT and keep on driving that - I just don't see they have enough energy and momentum for that, but as a smaller source code hosting platform they are not bad either).

cyberlurker• 3 months ago

What does Gitlab need to do to be that competition?

bigbuppo• 3 months ago

It needs to have fewer features and cost more money.

infogulch3• 3 months ago

I'm happy that raw git + mailing lists works great for the linux project, but can the rest of us all agree we actually do need issues & PRs? And that it's super painful to lose all this context when platform hopping, or when the service unilaterally decides to deplatform someone?

So where are we going? Mitchell will be deciding for Ghostty. If github's current trajectory is anything to go by, everyone else will need to decide where to go sooner rather than later.

I'm worried that it will be a Babel scattering event and this open source superpower that github catalyzed (how to describe it?) will just evaporate.

I'm also worried that wherever we go next could have the same fate as github.

So what then? Radicle is the only thing that I've seen that could theoretically 'solve' the problem, though it still needs a lot of work: https://radicle.dev/

noir_lord2• 3 months ago

There will be disruption as people move to various platforms and then one will “win” by a small amount which will self reenforce until we have a new GH and the pattern will likely repeat.

Companies will keep using GH for a long time because they seem to be really tolerant of outages (and have a massive switching cost depending on how much of GitHub they use outside of git).

Smaller teams/solo devs much less so.

Isn’t really anyway to coordinate it ahead of time, it’s more an emergent bottom up thing than a “all devs agree to move to X” ahead of time.

shrinks99• 3 months ago

tangled.org writes issues as atproto data that lives in a user's PDS which is one neat idea.

infogulch3• 3 months ago

Radicle stores issue & PR data as git objects. This approach interests me because issue data is as important as the code so we should treat it with the same care as the code. I.e. a tamper-proof cryptographic chain, signed objects, distributed redundancy, well-tread management features like synchronization and packfiles, etc.

hmokiguess2• 3 months ago

I know I work at GitHub so that might sound heretical, but I promise it’s not controversial for me to say it. Very few people internally believe that PRs and issues are ideal primitives for the future of engineering. And there are a lots of us inside the machine exploring what comes next.

From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/

dmix• 3 months ago

Github released that split PR beta, so sounds like they are still thinking about the future which is moving towards small manageable PRs which are part of a parent ticket. That's a solid way to dealing with AI codegen bloat.

shimman3• 3 months ago

Honestly the arrogance of their workers are truly astounding. It also tracks that someone with little software experience would become GitHub's staff research engineer. Truly a massive signal that we can't let these companies lead the direction of tech in our country.

aleksiy123• 3 months ago

Where is the arrogance? and I thought talk/slides where interesting.

And wdym even mean "lead the direction of tech". Its just people trying to build a product based on their views/vision.

Others are free to build their own competing visions? and everyones free to choose the platforms that they use.

reducesuffering• 3 months ago

You weren't kidding. They're an anthropologist who went into design a few years ago because "it's not terribly employable" and as of less than 1 year ago was a "Lead Design Engineer at Normally"? This is GitHub Staff eng steering the direction of the concept of PRs?

square_usual• 3 months ago

The state of HN truly has fallen if people are questioning Maggie Appleton's credentials. Besides, she's working on GitHub Next, not the core product. Sheesh.

booleandilemma• 3 months ago

I’m Maggie and I’m a staff research engineer at GitHub Next. At least that’s my title, but I’m actually a designer. Or I was, back when that was still a separate thing to engineering.

Ah. I didn't think we could debase the title of "engineer" any further, and yet here we are.

__turbobrew__• 3 months ago

I sit at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development

How do these people still have jobs post ZIRP?

duped2• 3 months ago

Great! I'll take my money to someone else who can handle the current state of engineering instead of wasting it trying to predict the future.

nothinkjustai• 3 months ago

The arrogance of anybody, let alone a designer, thinking they could build something better than the foundations of software (and the modern world itself) is crazy.

I love it, but you have to deliver or else I will mock you :P

farfatched• 3 months ago

There's clearly opportunity for a GitHub replacement that can operate reliably at scale.

I support Forgejo and Codeberg, but it's not clear that its architecture can scale to GitHub levels.

Microsoft subsidises a lot of OSS development. Who has equally big pockets?

toastal2• 3 months ago

We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.

rarisma• 3 months ago

I think GitHub has completely lost the plot over the last year or so, I don't think the stuff I work on will leave any time soon but I'm slowly losing my patience with github.

The other week I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my actions jobs were just stuck on waiting and not starting.

For my personal stuff, I think I'm going to migrate to either my own selfhosted instance of something like gitea or codeberg, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore imo for GitHub, even with stuff like free runners and pages.

I personally think this is mainly attributed to GH Copilot and I would love to know if MS/GH even makes a profit on it.

muragekibicho• 3 months ago

OP takes issue with GitHub's constant outages and alludes to agents (and Copilot bloat) as the primary cause.

Lots of big services are like this. Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak. I'm up right now because I know my Runpod VM in Kentucky is going to die rather abruptly and I'll need to manually get it up.

Everything has its flaws.

Microsoft lets you host your code, websites and media for free and

AlienRobot3• 3 months ago

OP says he's been using Github for 18 years, but he's only leaving now. I think this is enough evidence things have gotten worse.

ramon1562• 3 months ago

Even if your analysis was correct (you're hyper-focusing on the AI stuff), "Lots of big services are like this." is not an excuse.

zoogeny• 3 months ago

If I was OpenAI / Anthropic, I would see this as a massive opportunity.

I mean, why wouldn't you want to consolidate git repos, a heroku/fly.io/vercel like container system and direct access to web-based coding tools. They have the coding models and agents, slap a web interface over Claude Code running in a container, allow for commits and deploys. Control the entire stack.

caymanjim• 3 months ago

You're not alone. At my company, we're now making plans to self-host our Git and CICD. I probably can't sell them on Gitea+Drone or Forgejo or another open-source solution (even though it'd suit us well), but we're still going to find a solution that isn't dependent on someone else's platform not sucking.

darkteflon• 3 months ago

Copilot showing up unbidden on my PRs was the final straw for me. Well, actually, the final straw was not being able to figure out how to turn it off.

We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.

keybored2• 3 months ago

I thought that Ghostty was a company that had partnered with GitHub. But no it’s a popular open source application.

So they will move their CI and issue tracker somewhere else.

And this will be largely a springboard for “people are leaving the ship huh” and misc. GitHub demise discussions.

mkw5053• 3 months ago

Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833

https://api.github.com/users/<username>

dankwizard• 3 months ago

Thanks mkw5053

tonymet• 3 months ago

Hear me out: Github needs ads . If option A is downtime (and data integrity issues), Ads are more favorable. The terminal UI and PRs are both captive real estate that developers have to pay attention to.

There is a simple cost equation of 40-100x demand vs a fixed op-ex budget for the org. Github can either 40x their paying customer fees or try to monetize all of the free vibecoder (and open source) traffic.

duxup2• 3 months ago

Help me out here because I honestly don't know / must have a different workflow.

Are other people being impacted every day by github outages?

What does that look like?

I'm not saying the writer is wrong, I'm just wondering how folks who experience this every day work / how that exposure plays out / what it is.

skydhash3• 3 months ago

I've been impacted once: An action that failed to start (a PR check), then the merge button on that PR having no effect. Thankfully there was no urgency. It's a bit distressing because GitHub is kinda the engineering hub of the companies. We do have copies of the codebase on our computers and can launch build from there, but we have a process for a reason, and bypassing it is hacky.

notnmeyer• 3 months ago

prs not being visible because search is down, various ui elements not loading, pushes failing, merges failing, gha runs that fail with random errors or take forever to schedule

i literally do not recall the last day that passed without someone on my team noticing that some portion of gh was degraded.

fareesh• 3 months ago

i empathize with the folks running a largely free service who are being spammed by bots and built everything around some other assumptions

vvpan• 3 months ago

I, honestly, do not care about Github. As just a career dev it gives no utility except that a lot of the open source projects are on there.

DrTung• 3 months ago

A remnant of the old GitHub still remains, try surfing to a non-existing repositor like https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOf...

(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)

daft_pink• 3 months ago

It's odd. I've been having the same feeling as well. Earlier this week, they sent that email about copilot, which I don't use but pay $10 a month for and I canceled my subscription.

funkaster2• 3 months ago

I really like forgejo, but for OSS it's a complete no-no unless they want to manage PRs by email. Maintaining a forgejo instance and allowing anyone to join is a recipe for headaches. Until forgejo figures out the federation aspect (allow to send PRs from other forgejo instances, or some other distributed way), it will be hard for OSS to adopt them and keep the collaboration aspect.

preisschild3• 3 months ago

Why is it a no-no? Arent FOSS projects like Gadgetbridge or Forgejo itself using their PR system?

funkaster2• 3 months ago

It's just a PITA to contribute, compared to platforms with wider adoption like github/gitlab.

tux033• 3 months ago

From a security perspective, centralization cuts both ways.

Large platforms like GitHub have strong security teams and fast patching, but they also concentrate risk. A single vulnerability or abuse pattern can affect a huge portion of the ecosystem.

Decentralizing critical infrastructure doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it.

What It Means for Open Source, Infrastructure and Security: https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183

kid64• 3 months ago

An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?

sbinnee• 3 months ago

GitHub has become a place where you seek people’s attention. There are other places you can freely host your projects. GitLab was always available. I just haven’t logged in for I don’t know how long. An open source project is essentially a show window to the internet by a lonely developer. Ghostty has already established a great community. It’s already on display on a skyscraper. The project is mature enough that it needs a dedicated discussion forum or something like that. I am excited to see where it will find home and how it will evolve.

sira04• 3 months ago

From FreeBSD to Windows 2000: Microsoft’s Painful Hotmail Migration

https://archive.md/KZ0sy

ks2048• 3 months ago

I think this Twitter question and response (from the author) is helpful to understand the problem:

Question:

So, I'm also annoyed wit GitHub's stability (especially lately), but I'm curious: Ghostty has only a handful of PRs per day (excluding robot contribs); how is this a real problem? (and yes, I read your blog article).

Response:

1) The robot contribs don't auto-close if GH is down (cause it relies on GHA). We have retries but its pretty annoying.

(2) A PR isn't one and done. We need to comment, we need to run tests (~80 per run), and we do this multiple times per commit (due to review back and forth). So one PR has a lot of GH reliance right now.

(3) PRs tend to batch up, e.g. we don't do PR review constantly because all of us have other things to do, so we usually will try to review/merge multiple at one time. 3 PRs per day = 20 per week, which is a ton for volunteer time!

(4) We try to coordinate merge parties across maintainers in China+US+EU and if GH is down during our small time slice we just can't do any meaningful merging for 24 hours. We could alter our process here but that's just gaslighting.

(5) We get an order of magnitude more issue and discussion comments, which are affected by all of the above except CI. These are particularly affected by GHA/API outages.

(6) Dev work by maintainers happens in non-PR branches that run CI, and if CI is down we can't test our code (since Ghostty relies on a lot of testing we can't run locally, e.g. for platforms we don't have). It effectively pauses work on that branch.

(7) I've had multiple days in that 30-day window where Git operations themselves failed for different reasons. So I couldn't push a branch or whatever.

It just all adds up to be WAY too work impacting. The Ghostty maintainer channel is a stream of "oh GH is down again."

nikolay• 3 months ago

User 2882 here. What I know is that once a mass exodus occurs from service A to service B, the issues of service A that led people to leave it for service B will start to appear in service B as well.

latexr2• 3 months ago

Depends on the reason for the exodus. This time it was solely the degradation of the service, but every other post I’ve seen about leaving GitHub had ideological reasons related to Microsoft’s behaviour. It seems unlikely CodeBerg will start cooperating with ICE.

mvkel2• 3 months ago

I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months

So in response to GitHub Issues, PRs, etc. being occasionally inaccessible each day, you're going to make them inaccessible for months?

Feels like a knee-jerk emotional decision, one that doesn't serve you, Ghostty, or the community.

At least have your backup ready to go

yieldcrv• 3 months ago

I can’t think of anywhere that does those things better as an all in one package

I’ve done it with bitbucket, how has their uptime been?

dadima• 3 months ago

i would be very interesting seeing how the dev space will look in 5 years from now, and how would github look in 5 years from now

i have stopped opening github, i just use github cli heavily, that's it, gh gives everything i need out of the box

on github actions run on github and agent pull them, checks the issues and fixes the code, the whole workflow changed

mixmastamyk2• 3 months ago

Read the piece waiting for a diatribe on MS's unethical practices, left with an uptime complaint. Ok, if that is what it takes for people to move away from them, we'll take it.

throwawaypath• 3 months ago

Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!

Peaches4Rent• 3 months ago

I blame Agent Smith

- Mr. Anderson

bashtoni• 3 months ago

If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.

AlienRobot3• 3 months ago

This is not the large Elasticsearch outage they had on April 27, 2026. This blog post was written a week before that, so this was a different outage.

Great footnote to finish the article.

cartofupai• 3 months ago

Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.

aforwardslash3• 3 months ago

Im still waiting for... Basically anyone that has used TFS (what microsoft had/pushed before acquiring github) to do a similar post, detailing how they miss the tool original concept. I'm sitting down, don't worry about me.

theapadayo• 3 months ago

TFS (what microsoft had/pushed before acquiring github)

It's still around. It's just called Azure DevOps now. I personally think it's great for what it does.

pxc3• 3 months ago

What are those strengths? I've worked with projects hosted on GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps at my current job, and was generally not impressed with AzDO (mostly looking at CI stuff).

fHr• 3 months ago

I reiterate gitlab > github

dewey3• 3 months ago

GitHub needs a Sonos moment, after they launched their failed new app that made everyone angry and leave they got a new person in and I've seen them actively respond to issues on BlueSky with honest responses and not corporate fluff ever since while also turning the ship around.

https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...

pull_my_finger• 3 months ago

Outages aside, I have not put any serious work (of mine) on Github since it came out that they trained CoPilot on everyone's code without any sort of opt-in or details about how licenses were honored. I moved all my code, and I stopped doing the Hacktoberfests as I realized their incentive to have us all do it. All the good will I felt participating in FOSS was lost almost instantly. I still make FOSS and still participate in other's projects where I can, but I host my own stuff elsewhere.

xyst2• 3 months ago

gh been going down hill since microslop took over. No surprise.

0xbadcafebee3• 3 months ago

It was four years ago that GitHub had major enough outages with their database that they had to issue a press release (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...). Five months ago I was actually still recommending GitHub. Then a month ago I left the platform, because I couldn't get shit done anymore.

The alternatives aren't great. If any VCs wanna send a couple hundred grand my way, I'd be willing to start a GitHub alternative, if only so I could have a not-crappy place to host my own repos.

odie55332• 3 months ago

https://disroot.org/ provides Git hosting (and email, cloud storage, and more). Their annual revenue is about $35k. There's no money in this.

icy• 3 months ago

We did raise $4.5M recently to build exactly this: https://tangled.org

0xbadcafebee3• 3 months ago

edit if any VCs wanna give me millions of dollars to start a GitHub alternative, I might be willing to maybe consider it possibly

theYipster• 3 months ago

I remember visiting GitHub's downtown SF HQ sometime around 2014 or so... it was soon after they closed their first significant funding round, and years before they were purchased by MS. I had a friend who worked there as a very early employee. I was at IBM at the time doing AI stuff.

I remember saying to myself, "every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck...

A year or two later they had that public "me-too" snafu (years before me-too) that led to a founder's resignation, a whole bunch of other people leaving, and then Microsoft acquiring the company. I wondered back then, is this the end of the company?

Perhaps so, but perhaps not... Here we are, 8 years the acquisition, only now lamenting a slow demise. That's a nice run for a startup acquired by a behemoth enterprise software company. With the exception of Redhat (which is debatable,) IBM had no ability to keep a software acquisition's culture, verve, or ability alive past a year or two.

jes5199• 3 months ago

it was kind of a miracle that it held together as well as it did pre-Microsoft. I think to some degree, they got lucky, and were able to coast on being in the right place at the right time. And then because they were so central they attracted some amazing talent who managed to keep the thing scaling up _despite_ the culture.

kelnos5• 3 months ago

every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck...

To be fair, this could describe a lot of successful tech companies back in 2014.

I wondered back then, is this the end of the company? [...] Perhaps so, but perhaps not

As much as that stuff was often pretty toxic and super not inclusive, I think Microsoft is nearly 100% to blame here for Github's decline.

And even though all the drinking was really not great, in some ways I do miss those days. They were fun. Then again, I'm in my mid-40s now and can't drink and party like that anymore. Today, even a single night out with 3-4 drinks (plus twice as much water) over the span of 6 hours or so makes me a useless lump of garbage for half of the next day.

SupLockDef• 3 months ago

Do not forget: "Embrace AI or get out!"

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...

amai3• 3 months ago

Thomas Dohmke is out. Probably he did not embrace AI enough. He is now working for several companies as advisor and board member.

Decabytes• 3 months ago

Come to the Gnu Savannah (jk) strange to see so many projects moving off GitHub. I always used gitlab, and only grudgingly had a GitHub, because that is where every project was. So while seeing people move off GitHub validates my choice to not personally invest in it, I can’t help but be a little sad that We are splitting across the different git providers.

neya• 3 months ago

All this because Microsoft won't sunset the crap that is Azure and rebuild something reliable from ground up. GitHub survived on Ruby On Rails - which was notorious for being slow at scale back then - and still managed to have better uptime than all the execs at Microsoft managed to do so far since its acquisition. What a shame.

dewey3• 3 months ago

People suggesting git bug and other solutions miss one important part that also makes GitHub sticky: They have an app, being able to look at issues on your phone, getting notifications and being able to review things there is worth a lot.

vadepaysa3• 3 months ago

What is confusing to me, is as a business I would happily pay GitHub for many many features that I pay others for. Maybe MS thinks its just a billion here, billion there, but isn't it so easy to capture these?

1. faster more configureable action runtimes so I can get faster builds 2. usable merge queues because the github one is a joke 3. some reasonable CI management and workflow debugging features

JustSkyfall• 3 months ago

re: #1, Blacksmith (https://blacksmith.sh) exists and it works pretty well!

vadepaysa3• 3 months ago

Yes, I pay for blacksmith rn. Thank You for your response though.

suryao• 3 months ago

Founder of WarpBuild here: we provide faster runners (also cheaper), and have some niceties around debugging workflows like ssh-ing into them, observability etc.

vadepaysa3• 3 months ago

Thank You, great product. Do you have something for merge queues?

philipnee• 3 months ago

what exactly is going wrong with github aside from all the outages in the past x months? i honestly don't find it particularly disruptive to work/personal stuff. excuse my ignorant, maybe i don't use github enough to know what causes this fury...

fwiw - i do keep a fair amount of code in my computer. i don't push everything..

tracerbulletx• 3 months ago

I feel this. :/ It also just reminds me of everything we've lost in tech since the 2010s. When I used to put Octocat and Google stickers on my laptop and go to conferences every year and everyone was so optimistic and vibrant.

kelnos5• 3 months ago

This made me think of Github's charity dodgeball tournament. The last one was in 2016. For an entry fee that went to a donation to charity, your company could field a dodgeball team. It was super fun, and we (at Twilio) attended for several years.

While I'm not going to say they stopped because of Microsoft (they didn't get acquired until 2018, though I would expect that talks were probably underway by sometime in 2017), the loss of something like this does feel emblematic of how tech culture got significantly less fun toward the end of the 2010s, and the pandemic just killed the rest of it for me.

(Of course, "fun" is in the eye of the beholder. It's possible that my tastes just changed as I got older.)

aorth2• 3 months ago

I doom scroll GitHub issues too. :( I'm so addicted to open source hahahahah.

I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...

balex• 3 months ago

I read this and felt like I was reading a moltbook post.

Am I an agent? Are you?

Is Claude... God?

gyoridavid• 3 months ago

<rant> I feel like this is the classic tale of corporate greed. Startups should stay startups. From the users perspective, I always hated the fact that you are the product. They create a great software, give you nice things, you fall in love and start to use the software, even advertise it in your circles because it's soo good. Then they sell the whole thing with you and your bros for big buck, and the new management slowly start to squeeze all the money out of it to justify the purchase while ruining the product. </rant>

ahf8Aithaex7Nai• 3 months ago

The thing you love has been bought by Microsoft. When things belong to a large corporation, they can (and probably will) drift off in some absurd direction, because in a way, the relationship is reversed. The thing no longer serves you; instead, the brand, the user base, the reputation, and the key role and function of the thing are put at the service of investors. In this process, you are demoted from subject to object; from an animal grazing on open grasslands to an animal grazing in a fenced-in pasture to an animal standing in a stall and being fed compressed pellets that contain bone meal from its own species for nutritional value. That’s why it’s important not to walk into the fences too naively, even if the grass there is fresh and lush.

singingtoday2• 3 months ago

This is fantasticly poetic!

CjHuber• 3 months ago

Are you… explaining the effects of being acquired to Hashimoto?

nyeah• 3 months ago

But keep in mind the demographics of chat. 80% of the commenters are much smarter and more knowledgeable than the other 80%.

franktankbank• 3 months ago

Also they own your code in any real sense.

versecafe• 3 months ago

I do hope something good comes out of it with new platforms competing to refine, innovate, and iterate on git hosting and the UX of it all.

raincole2• 3 months ago

Not to defend Github, but I sometimes feel there are two Githubs that aren't related to each other.

This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day

Do people seriously experience outage every day? I really don't know... it always has been feeling like a once-per-six-month thing. Do people have extremely complex Actions that I can't fathom?

nxtfari• 3 months ago

Do people have extremely complex Actions that I can't fathom?

Yes. Think CI jobs that test every candidate PR against a matrix of build targets, run fuzzing, run simulation tests, run bench regression tests, etc etc. Modern CI workflow automation has reached way beyond what a pedestrian can fathom if you’re not on the wave.

midtake• 3 months ago

Everyone should have abandoned ship sooner, namely when they were consuming content for Copilot without permission. When it became obvious that pushing your code to GitHub meant giving it directly to Microsoft I stopped using it altogether and ran my own git/gitlab/gitea (I've changed approaches several times).

r0b05• 3 months ago

One of the issues is that Github competes with Azure Devops, and MS prefers to push Azure.

immanuwell• 3 months ago

tldr: chronic outages, near-daily github actions failures blocking real work

erlend_sh• 3 months ago

Really feel this. Along with group chat (irc), GitHub is the best form of social networking I’ve ever experienced. It’s how my co-founder and I first connected some 6-7 years ago. It’s the real LinkedIn for devs, where the posting activity is the work itself, rather than posting about the work. A truly magical place, while it lasted.

aorth2• 3 months ago

I know gitea / forgejo will be a popular suggestion, either self-hosted or via something like Codeberg. Despite also being a GitHub user since 2010 and also "doomscrolling" issues for projects I am involved in, I do host a gitea for personal projects where I don't need the GitHub network effect. It works well and is surprisingly capable!

Having said that, I stumbled upon this curious blog post about a security issues in Forgejo: https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html

nottorp2• 3 months ago

Is there any service left that will just host your git and offer issues and PRs without cramming anything else down your throat, especially automated help, LLM based or not?

Ideally with private repos for free or a modest fee.

Gitea doesn't count because they only want to sell hosting to large organizations. The pre MS github model for private repos was just fine(tm).

Myzel394• 3 months ago

As a European user of github I've only had one two occasions of it being down. I guess we can just be lucky it got a better uptime while we are awake

sammy2255• 3 months ago

Bro was treating github like social media

gbuaeru• 3 months ago

Yes, I love their daily UX optimisations like showing issues comments in time ascending and having to click read more several times to get to latest comments. Each and every time.

ceving• 3 months ago

Is there anything less important than the origin URL of a Git repository?

yangcheng• 3 months ago

github failure is a live lesson of dysfunctional org. A business unit like github need a CEO.

grougnax• 3 months ago

enshittification, as usual

tabs_or_spaces• 3 months ago

When I went through tough breakups? I lost myself in open source... on GitHub. During college at 4 AM when everyone is passed out? Let me get one commit in. During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub. It's where I've historically been happiest and wanted to be.

I've never had such an obsession to a platform or an activity as this. Some might say this is unhealthy, but I admire folks who can reach this level of obsession in their craft. It's just a joy to read about for me

vetler• 3 months ago

Have not had such big outage issues as what's described here, although I have noticed more stability issues lately. Is this worse while Europe is sleeping maybe?

sifex• 3 months ago

Typically we see it when the US comes online, we’ll see 500s on availability across all of GitHub — either corroborated by number of active users, number of updates GitHub is pushing (being a mainly US company), or a combination of both.

__alexs• 3 months ago

GitHub has been stagnant for so many years now. There was an extremely brief period where it was actually good and innovative at the same time.

They've started shipping stuff again, but it's mostly not stuff I want.

yoyohn• 3 months ago

Microsoft truly is the reverse King Midas!

QuiCasseRien• 3 months ago

just use https://onedev.io/ !

best dev platform

wartywhoa23• 3 months ago

Was hoping to see a point about full-on chutzpah at training AI without any consent on all code uploaded to GitHub, but alas.

Too negligible a problem. Service outages are much more important issues, and much less controversial.

ElenaDaibunny• 3 months ago

Anyway, good luck with the migration. Curious where you land. And honestly? Props for actually following through instead of just complaining on Twitter like the rest of us.

foldr• 3 months ago

Is it really the case that GitHub had fewer issues in its early days? Or have our expectations just increased as GitHub has effectively become a critical piece of infrastructure? Go back to 2010 and half the functionality that people are complaining about (e.g. actions) didn’t even exist.

The author is entitled to his feelings. People can host their projects wherever they like. However, this is also a huge drama about basically nothing. GitHub is actually much more useful now than it was in its heyday (when it had far fewer features to go wrong).

icc97• 3 months ago

Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives

There's probably a few more to be added there now.

shizcakes• 3 months ago

Check your PRs - some major options missing!

BrenBarn• 3 months ago

One can only hope that as people get tired of Github and move to other services, we'll see better Mercurial options. I feel like git itself mainly gained in popularity because of Github.

Either way, the thing that irks me about the Github situation is that so many people joined Github specifically because it was "where everything was happening". And now they realize that having one place where everything is happening is not really a great situation if that place starts going south. We need a range of providers with good interop rather than centralization.

abc123abc123• 3 months ago

Github is Microsoft. Nothing more needs to be said, and all of Microsofts products and services must be avoided like the plague they are. A lot of young people have not had the "pleasure" of dealing with Microsoft historically, when open source was a cancer, so I understand why they make the same mistakes that people did in the 90s and 00s.

edward_huazai• 3 months ago

github is very disappionted for me, copilot usage changing is awful

ianberdin• 3 months ago

Is it a joke? GitHub is not perfect, but it is mostly free and survives billions of commits every day. You don’t think We are all able to scale a service so well.

I don’t know, I love it. There are many alternatives like bitbucket, gitlab, but GitHub is still better overall.

bromuro• 3 months ago

I cannot say i love or hate it as it is just a tool, but i use github all day long and the reactions here seems exaggerated and dramatic.

odie55332• 3 months ago

I use Github as well and yes it has been down sometimes, but Gitlab has outages too. For me Github is still in good territory and would have to get a lot worse for me to even think about moving off. Gitlab is basically better, but it's not better enough to suffer a migration.

crowdhailer• 3 months ago

This was good for me to read. I'm still on GitHub, but think about moving more frequently than I'd like to

nekitamo• 3 months ago

I wonder if this is related to the pretty serious security incident about Github which got published today:

https://x.com/sagitz_/status/2049153195243372569

With malicious HTTP headers, any user could access any repo on Github.com, or on the Enterprise Github instance they might have access to. It's even worse than that because it's remote code execution on the Github server.

It seems like Github has been a mess since the Microsoft acquisition. Definitely feels like another multi billion dollar screwup in the making, like Skype or Nokia were.

Hopefully the incidents in the last few weeks are a wakeup call, and they start getting their shit together.

rtavares• 3 months ago

I wonder if this is related to the pretty serious security incident about Github which got published today

It is not. From the first footnote in the blog post:

We've been discussing and putting together a plan to leave GitHub for months, and this blog post was written over a week ago. We only made the final decision this week.

ffaser5gxlsll• 3 months ago

Aside from outages, what really bothers me lately about GH is how slow the "app" actually is. Keeping a tab open on a PR status check burns 25-30% of a core on my cpu even when it's hidden. Reviewing large PRs has an awful workflow. Almost every diff page I load starts with "there's nothing here" then starts to load...

sylware• 3 months ago

microsoft destroyed github: they were careful at keeping classic web (noscript/basic (x)html) support for their core features... and after being bought, everything broke steps by steps.

Now, you must have a whatng cartel web engine to interact with most of the basic features.

Thx microsoft, again.

devs should start to leave microsoft github, but for a forge which respects the web (namely which has a web site, and which is not only a web app).

aussieguy1234• 3 months ago

I guess these outages are the outcome of attempts to replace engineers with AI at GitHub.

Other companies considering similar things should take note.

Related: Vibe Coding Will Break Your Company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930738

throwatdem12311• 3 months ago

Copilot and vibe coding being pushed so aggressively by Microslop and Slophub that it’s now killing their core product.

Mitchell said on X if he was in charge, he would shut down copilot completely. It might bring in revenue but without core GitHub, Copilot also goes to zero and he’s totally right about this.

It makes absolutely no sense for Microslop to have Copilot when they have such a huge stake in OpenAI and they have Codex. The price hikes for copilot tokens and the massive backlash proves this is not a good business model. Just shut it down and get back to fundamentals.

AI is a cancer and it slowly hollows out everything it touches. Corporate greed is merely an accelerant.

You might say “it’s merely a tool”, but it’s impossible for me to divorce the realities of the terrible harm these generative AI tools are doing to the world and it’s immensely selfish to be like “well it generates slop code for me good enough so I don’t care about all the other bad stuff”. So I just suffer in silence at work because I’m forced to use AI to generate code even though I probably spend more time just reprompting then I would just writing things by hand.

The worst thing is needing to babysit third world contractors they gave a Claude subscription to - the worst slop I have ever seen. Give me a meatsack junior right out of college with no AI over this garbage any day of the week.

And if that wasn’t bad enough - we had to fire our lead CSM the other day because he secretly reverse engineered our private API with Claude and built something that he put unauthenticated on the public internet that leaked a bunch of customer data. Absolute nightmare dealing with the fallout of this that didn’t need to happen. And if that wasn’t bad enough he tried to extort money from us because the thing he built was supposed to replace one of our vendors. This was by-far the worst case of AI psychosis induced Dunning-Krueger I have ever seen. He’s actually going to try to sue the company now for wrongful termination! I bet Claude told him he was absolutey right!

It’s not like I can just find another job either, the market is sh*t and everything else is forcing these tools anyway. So yeah, thank you SV for destroying the tech labour market, suppressing wages, and making the already deteriorating state of software quality even worse.

Frankly, the ROI of these tools is murky at best and it’s gonna get worse as they raise prices. I don’t see what benefit they actually bring beyond a hit of dopamine when it near-shots a task. I have yet to see any killer app that feels truely like AI is doing something worthwhile. And all the startups I see that are AI first are just selling AI orchestration to other AI startups. BORING. They tried making an AI MySpace and it was a disaster, so what CAN these things actually do?

OpenClaw is supposed to be some revolutionary thing but nobody actually does anything truely novel with it. Oh it aggregates your news for you? Congratulations I have an app that already does that without AI and it doesn’t cost me per token.

livesinhel• 3 months ago

Missed a perfect opportunity to call Copilot Slopilot.

zoobab• 3 months ago

Push your AI code on GitSlop, nowa available on gitslop.com.

samiv• 3 months ago

So some guy wants to get their hobby project off of GitHub. So? What compels them to write a whiny blog post about it even? Weird.

bfrog2• 3 months ago

GitHub lost its way right around the time it was bought by a large corporate entity.

Had they remained independent I have no doubt it'd be a very different story.

bfrog2• 3 months ago

I wonder if radicle.xyz will start taking off, as there is no corporate entity hanging over its head, and never likely will be.

exec7• 3 months ago

microsoft killed every last good thing about github. even the definition of open source has ben hijacked by a mega corp. i think this is the perfect time for a alternative to rise!

AlexArias• 3 months ago

As a newbie to the tech world what are some of the more popular alternatives to GitHub and why? I know Mitchell mentions alternatives in the article but he’s yet to decide where he’s headed if I understood correctly.

robeym2• 3 months ago

Most people run to GitLab or Codeberg. The real loss is network effect of everyone being on GitHub.

GitLab: most similar to GitHub. Repos, CI/CD, issues. Hosted or self-host

Codeberg: free, non-profit, FOSS-friendly. Runs Forgejo. Where Zig went

Forgejo / Gitea: lightweight, self-host on a small server

Bitbucket: fine if you're already in Atlassian/Jira land

Sourcehut: minimalist, email-patch workflow. Fast but a culture shift

Radicle: peer-to-peer, no central server. Niche, principled

Tangled: newer, built on ATProto

red_admiral• 3 months ago

I predict that if any other platform can challenge github to the point where it has let's say 1/10 of the users, pushes, workflows etc. that github has today, we'll start seeing outages and bugs there too.

Individual forges might support a few thousand users if set up professionally; codeberg etc. might give you an order or two of magnitude more. Gitlab has something like 50M users [1] but it's unclear whether that includes self-hosting, I suspect it does.

Github hit 100M users in 2023 [2] and will hit double that before long if trends continue - the figure of 180M is quoted in different places like [3] for the end of 2025.

From the same page: "Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute, merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month (+23% YoY), and pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY)—including a record of nearly 100 million in August alone."

At that scale, it's a miracle anything works at all to be honest, and suggests that Microsoft probably _is_ throwing some love, money, and some of the best developers at it just so the thing stays up even some of the time while they're hitting exponential growth.

The current situation sucks, but it's not evidence that Microsoft is being deliberately evil.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/ [2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-d... [3] https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...

ozgrakkurt3• 3 months ago

Is there actual evidence that it is hard to do that?

I also believe I can do it better if you give me the amount of money they spend and I can hire the same engineers.

It should be shockingly easy to not push crap into it so they can make it actually work.

It is evidence that they are doing a bad job, it could be because they are incompetent, evil or just have different priorities

robeym2• 3 months ago

Anytime Microsoft buys something it's time to start looking for alternatives

rurban• 3 months ago

As long as GitHub Actions is free for Open Source, I'll keep using it. There's nothing comparable for free yet.

Of course Github using now Azure as a testbed is problematic. Since Azure is mismanaged and doomed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 the problem will either be fixed or we all have to leave. I think they hired cheap staff to manually fix overprovisioned Azure boxes on demand. Maybe the morons at Azure will come to their senses one day, or not.

vinnyhaps• 3 months ago

Hey! One of the maintainers of Radicle (https://radicle.dev/) here

If you have the time, it would be great to see you trying out Radicle, even if it’s just for a mirror to start; then see how we can turn that into something more integrated!

vonneumannstan• 3 months ago

I've felt this way for a long time, but for the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X.

I must be a filthy casual because I'm sure I can count on one hand the number of times a Github outage has affected my work.

n0gared• 3 months ago

You should be CEO of github or make your own git hub.

peterpanhead• 3 months ago

I remember sourceforge, not as good.

sathishmg• 3 months ago

Github is fine, but it's getting costly for private repo owners, especially Rust developers. Compilation takes forever, action time runs out quickly.

_august• 3 months ago

Excited to see what Graphite is cooking: https://x.com/MerrillLutsky/status/2049231503108780405

mdnahas• 3 months ago

Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?

tomerbd• 3 months ago

I didn't get it. Why are they leaving GitHub?

m3kw9• 3 months ago

Ghostty doesn't get updated frequently, thought it was a low velocity project with minimal let it run off into the sunset project. It took them a year or 2 to get even a seemingly simple "find text" feature, which I thought was standard lowest bar you must pass to be a competent terminal.

blablabla123• 3 months ago

GitHub indeed used to be a undisputably good entity. Now I whenever I push something non-trivial I wonder if some AI will take my code without credit.

I don’t mind the lower availability to be honest but I also noticed it.

To be fair I don’t add new code on GitHub for my own private projects anymore. Public projects of course profit from the network effect but there must be a better way. Before GitHub people also did well, Linux, many well known GNU projects etc. were created without GitHub.

miki123211• 3 months ago

PSA: For many people, the alternative to Github is Codeberg, and they're doing some extremely shady stuff. They claim to be open source, but the code on their servers is definitely not the code in their repo.

They have a visual-only captcha on signup with a (extremely-badly-documented and non-obvious) workaround for accessibility, and that workaround doesn't work if you build Codeberg from source. If you look at the commit history, the frontend changes for the workaround are still there (tucked away in an unassuming refactoring commit), the backend check... isn't.

This is the one undocumented change we can clearly detect, God only knows how many more there are. For such a self-described champion of open source, such behavior should be considered unacceptable.

I'm deliberately not describing the workaround here, I suppose that the reason it's so well hidden is to prevent spammers from abusing it. As it is currently the only way to sign up for a Codeberg account with a screen reader, no matter how ineffective for most people, I'm hesitant to post more details here. All I'm going to say is that it can be found if you carefully look at the frontend code of the signup form.

I've tried reaching out to Codeberg about this (had a DM conversation on Mastodon with one of the members, but there was no further response.

dsiegel2275• 3 months ago

I don't understand the point of writing and sharing this.

Don't want to use a service anymore? Fine, stop using it and move to something else. But why publish something that you knows for sure is just going to be bad press for another company and organization?

cyberclimb• 3 months ago

Why share any opinion ever?

warmwaffles• 3 months ago

Because he wants to move it and then has to provide rationale behind why Ghostty is moving away from Github.

mgdev• 3 months ago

Mitchell is a bellwether.

This is a 'tipping point' situation. Exodus will be a little at a time, then all at once.

nurettin• 3 months ago

I felt this kind of heartbreak when I found that freenode was gone, the channels got scattered and became unrecognizable. That era of computing that you were a part of, you knew and were comfortable with for decades is just yanked away.

latentframe• 3 months ago

When critical infra becomes centralized then the reliability expectations shift from good enough to essential. Its normal that outages stop being simple issues and become production blockers

fragmede5• 3 months ago

Imagine a world where Google had bought GitHub instead of Microsoft.

4k93n2• 3 months ago

they would have shut it down after 5 years

ost-ing• 3 months ago

GitHubs AI usage policy was enough for me to leave. Sick of corporate overlords stealing everything from us.

If it’s free - you are the product.

PeterStuer• 3 months ago

I have my own forgejo and push to both that and github. My work does not have to stop if one or the other is down. Now ofc, I am not a 'heavy' user of Github automation, so for me this is easy. But making sure you at the very minimum have a fully inhouse possibilty of basic manual pushing and pulling from your various dev/test/prod environments when shit hits the fan should be a given for all.

amai3• 3 months ago

Github is moving to Azure.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

Might explain at least a part of the issues.

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

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