23 ms·

Ghostty is leaving GitHub

• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• arn3n 5mo 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 5mo ago
    https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/ https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
    • rstupek 5mo ago
      I'm curious if your graph had the number of projects its hosting shown as well?
  • PunchyHamster 5mo ago
    It started being bad after MS. It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI
  • celestialcheese 5mo ago
    Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
    • Reason077 5mo 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-githubs-recent-availability-issues-2/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi... An update on GitHub availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
      • dijit 5mo ago
        But the outages have been getting worse and worse even before anything related to AI took off. The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company. So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well. There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).
      • vvillena 5mo ago
        Their own greed is causing their issues. They could be doing a million different things to reduce demand, but they don't want to dampen their current growth and have opted to continue scaling up at the cost of quality.
        • omosubi 5mo ago
          What would you suggest they do to reduce demand? (This is a serious question btw)
          • jitl 5mo ago
            They could make people pay for stuff that is free right now.
            • jtj606 5mo ago
              And yet: GitHub is also getting called greedy and horrible for moving to usage based billing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357
      • plorkyeran 5mo ago
        Github is claiming that a usage spike in 2026 is the cause of availability issues in 2025, so their explanation is clearly incomplete at best. The usage spike may be why things have failed to get better despite them putting effort into improving things, but it isn't the root cause of problems.
    • dgb23 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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-vaporized-a-trillion https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
    • ergocoder 5mo 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 5mo ago
    Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?
    • cyberpunk 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
    Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have
  • carlos-menezes 5mo ago
    I'd add a third point: record service usage. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    • marginalia_nu 5mo ago
      We don't have a labeled y-axis so their record usage could be a 5% increase for all they're showing us.
      • weiliddat 5mo ago
        I think it doesn't need to be a large X% increase, just needs to hit some critical infra threshold where various services start failing and cascade. Weakest link and everything.
      • msla 5mo ago
        This isn't 1998 anymore.
        • marginalia_nu 5mo ago
          Were we better at labeling axes in 1998? Sounds plausible, but who knows.
    • sureglymop 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • tfrancisl 5mo 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.
    • saghm 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    • dijit 5mo 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.
  • bayindirh 5mo 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 5mo 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.
      • bayindirh 5mo ago
        Please see below. This is from the OG, "first generation" Copilot, from 2022. If I can find any more from my dusty trove, I'll edit or reply to this very comment. I can't do more digging now, because I'm in a pinch. > Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now. Arguably "The Stack" contains only permissively licensed code, but there are two repositories of mine inside it. One is a very simple logging library, without any license (which implies "All Rights Reserved"), and another is a fork of LightDM which I worked on, which is GPL licensed. So any "permissively licensed" dataset probably contains at least one copylefted or strong copyrighted codebase, making them highly suspicious. == EDIT == Found some. Kagi's date-constrained search to the rescue. 1. Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931 2. GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515 3. AI-Powered GitHub Copilot Leaves Preview, Now Costs $100 a Year: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/06/25/0334207/ai-powered-github-copilot-leaves-preview-now-costs-100-a-year https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/06/25/0334207/ai-po... 4. GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories (CTRL+F on the page): https://web.archive.org/web/20260428180443/https://github.com/features/copilot https://web.archive.org/web/20260428180443/https://github.co...
  • SwellJoe 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    • pluc 5mo 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.
  • draw_down 5mo ago
    [dead]
• fridder 5mo 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.
• tedivm 5mo 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/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
  • yetihehe 5mo 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 :(.
    • pathartl 5mo 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.
      • SwellJoe 5mo ago
        Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.
        • pathartl 5mo ago
          Idk, I'm in my mid 30's and I've never had a moment where I've been glad to see something on SourceForge.
• rgbrgb 5mo 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• tommica 5mo ago
  Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
• preommr 5mo 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.
  • cyberpunk 5mo ago
    Yes. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ 94 incidents in 90 days.
    • AlienRobot 5mo ago
      It's not always you see a status page so colorful...
  • anon7000 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • charcircuit 5mo 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 5mo 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.
      • charcircuit 5mo ago
        But that requires people to buy into that no different from requiring other people to buy in to uploading to gitlab or some other alternative.
        • drzaiusx11 5mo ago
          I think the key point is that it's one atproto login/did to many forges 1:N in tangled.org's "knots" network without the reliance on a single host provider/instance like GitHub/GitLab/whatever as a single point of failure.
  • vvill 5mo ago
• xswhiskey 5mo 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 5mo ago
  I'm sensing a trend
• atonse 5mo 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.
  • MarsIronPI 5mo 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_ 5mo ago
      Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
      • deleted 5mo ago
        [deleted]
      • MarsIronPI 5mo ago
        Oh, I'd forgotten about GitLab and Bitbucket. How is Bitbucket doing these days?
    • NewJazz 5mo 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.
      • 5mo ago
• contact9879 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• sudb 5mo 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.
  • DANmode 5mo 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)?
    • sudb 5mo ago
      As in, to present themselves as the new defacto git host, capitalizing on GitHub's actual + perceived lack of reliability
      • DANmode 5mo ago
        No, I understood that. How? I want to partake in the thought exercise. What more could/should GitLab, for example, be doing to capitalize?
        • sudb 5mo ago
          I suppose I primarily mean marketing - perhaps the most immediate concrete example I can think of is some sort of co-promotion alongside some mainstream vibe-coding tool that positions them as the git host of choice.
          • DANmode 5mo ago
            Perhaps humanizing posts like this: https://blog.tangled.org/federation https://blog.tangled.org/federation
• mitchellh 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • DrammBA 5mo 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?
    • lpcvoid 5mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ben_w 5mo ago
        Deeper than that, but likely also that. CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
• incognito124 5mo 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 :))
  • baggachipz 5mo 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.
    • atonse 5mo 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).
      • Klonoar 5mo ago
        No, that’s just solving for you. The person you are responding to is asking for an ethical stand; just because you can ignore it doesn’t mean it’s not there. This is the same bullshit that people bring up with Facebook, there’s no reason we can’t apply the same rubric to Twitter.
        • atonse 5mo ago
          Sorry, I don't follow. Are you saying that he should leave a social network website because some of its users are bad? Or that the people that run the website are bad? And also, there's some alternate microblogging site that is less hostile to truth and civility? Which site is that?
• WadeGrimridge 5mo ago
  Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168 https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
  • latexr 5mo ago
    https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168 https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
    • CamperBob2 5mo 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?
      • sho_hn 5mo ago
        This sounds like massive centralization on GitHub and super ugly product coupling, instead of rolling open standards. I'm now glad Mitchell doesn't run GitHub.
    • cedws 5mo 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.
      • mi_lk 5mo ago
        Being pragmatic means admitting AI is unstoppable whether you like it or not. Stopping copilot BS doesn't conflict with that
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• VadimPR 5mo ago
  The question is where do you go?
• JuniperMesos 5mo 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 5mo 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_hn 5mo 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 5mo ago
      GitLab cloud lost some of my projects. And it was (is?) quite slow. Props to those who can keep it running self hosted.
• underdeserver 5mo ago
  Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
  • i_think_so 5mo ago
    2026 - when you have to specify which catastrophic outage was the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted your migration.
• basilikum 5mo 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_so 5mo 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_so 5mo ago
      ....of course less than 24 hours later I stumble across https://radicle.dev/ https://radicle.dev/ completely by accident. It's been in the works for years. Well played, universe.
• stratigos 5mo ago
  All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.
• dueyfinster 5mo 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 https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster
• nextaccountic 5mo 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 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)
  • senko 5mo 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 5mo ago
      It was 10 days, but that's fine too.
    • Zambyte 5mo ago
      https://radicle.dev/ https://radicle.dev/
      • nextaccountic 5mo ago
        Are radicle issues and PRs stored in the Git repository itself, or is it out of band like other forges, with just federation on top?
        • gsaslis 5mo ago
          yes, they're stored in git itself. See https://radicle.dev/guides/protocol#collaborative-objects https://radicle.dev/guides/protocol#collaborative-objects
    • jancsika 5mo ago
• sergiotapia 5mo ago
  Github was not built for a world where its userbase quadrupled and are pumping in generated slop at non-stop pace.
  • DANmode 5mo ago
    So not their problem.
    • sergiotapia 5mo ago
      Is their problem, but have some grace. You wouldn't be able to handle this insane growth either.
      • DANmode 5mo ago
        They’re being stuffed into Microsoft’s behemoth, and being taken off-mission by them. People uploading more code doesn’t necessitate switching to Microsoft Azure backend, and doing other inane things that only benefit Microsoft.
  • ozgrakkurt 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • Rapzid 5mo ago
    Teams has introduced substantial improvements over the past couple years..
    • deaux 5mo 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!!!
      • Rapzid 5mo ago
        Ah yes, ... Yes?
• oybng 5mo ago
  The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition
• scottyah 5mo ago
  Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.
  • alienbaby 5mo 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.
• stabbles 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.
• OtomotO 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  I could recommend trying out source hut!
• senko 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • oulipo2 5mo 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 5mo ago
      I didn’t read this as a flex. More a rueful admission of his connection/addiction to GitHub.
      • i_think_so 5mo ago
        I saw it as a sad combination of the two.
  • arionmiles 5mo ago
    Upvoted for the username
• maxclark 5mo 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.
• velcrovan 5mo 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)
  • chungy 5mo 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 https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/ce238fccfd6b124d
    • velcrovan 5mo ago
      I’m aware, I was one of the people who commented on that thread!
• LelouBil 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• featherless 5mo 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.
  • colechristensen 5mo ago
    Is GitLab pretty good these days? I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.
    • shimman 5mo 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.
      • mixmastamyk 5mo ago
        Also written in golang so much faster using fewer resources.
      • bsza 5mo ago
        It's also probably easier to migrate to if you have complex workflows as Forgejo Actions is designed to be similar to GH Actions. (Never actually tried it myself though, I switched to Woodpecker long ago.)
    • cyberpunk 5mo 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.
    • whalesalad 5mo 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)
• tempestnick 5mo 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 5mo ago
  pack it up. we're going to codeberg.
• krainboltgreene 5mo 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.
  • pocksuppet 5mo ago
    git is worker owned - unless the worker chooses to outsource its ownership
    • krainboltgreene 5mo ago
      git is not a company, you're thinking of Github. Classic mistake.
      • pocksuppet 5mo ago
        GitHub is not worker owned. git is.
        • krainboltgreene 5mo ago
          You can't be a worker owned company if you're not a company.
• erelong 5mo ago
  's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018
• debo_ 5mo ago
  GitHub literally getting ghosted
• hmokiguess 5mo ago
  GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  • JamesFM 5mo ago
    This is assigning an unearned malicious competence to Microsoft
• nimbius 5mo 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.
  • artyom 5mo 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 5mo 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.
      • artyom 5mo ago
        There won't be any. I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion. They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.
• aykutseker 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Related: An Update on GitHub Availability https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• eiiot 5mo 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/ 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/ https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
  • qudat 5mo 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 https://pgit.pico.sh (static site generator for git) and https://pr.pico.sh https://pr.pico.sh (pastebin for git collab) They are still a WIP but it’s on our roadmap to continue to improve.
  • poidos 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• mikeputnam 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
• bluegatty 5mo ago
  Best alternative list anyone?
• butterlesstoast 5mo 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.
• chrisweekly 5mo ago
  Luke Wroblewski posted this earlier today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukew_small-taste-of-the-incoming-ai-agent-world-share-7454933169696403456-hUMs 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.
  • cyberpunk 5mo ago
    There's no Y axis. It doesn't mean anything. There could be a 10% difference since 2023 for all we know.
• sholladay 5mo 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_so 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• samtrack2019 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  GitHub is fine.
  • wetpaws 5mo ago
    [dead]
• qsera 5mo 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 5mo ago
    Linux kernel source is hosted at https://kernel.org https://kernel.org , not GitHub. You're probably thinking of Linus Torvald's read-only mirror[1]. [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux https://github.com/torvalds/linux
    • qsera 5mo ago
      Thanks for the correction.
• thomasfl 5mo 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 5mo 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_love 5mo 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.
  • Rapzid 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• joeblogsmomma 5mo ago
  [dead]
• _doctor_love 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
    What does Gitlab need to do to be that competition?
    • bigbuppo 5mo ago
      It needs to have fewer features and cost more money.
• infogulch 5mo 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/ https://radicle.dev/
  • noir_lord 5mo 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 5mo ago
    tangled.org writes issues as atproto data that lives in a user's PDS which is one neat idea.
    • infogulch 5mo 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.
• hmokiguess 5mo 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/ https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
  • dmix 5mo 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.
    • deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
  • shimman 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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?
• farfatched 5mo 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?
• toastal 5mo ago
  We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.
• rarisma 5mo 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 5mo 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
  • AlienRobot 5mo 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.
  • ramon156 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• keybored 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833 https://api.github.com/users/<username>
  • dankwizard 5mo ago
    Thanks mkw5053
• tonymet 5mo 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.
• duxup 5mo 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.
  • skydhash 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  A remnant of the old GitHub still remains, try surfing to a non-existing repositor like https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOfTheParty https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOf... (however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)
• daft_pink 5mo 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.
• funkaster 5mo 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.
  • preisschild 5mo ago
    Why is it a no-no? Arent FOSS projects like Gadgetbridge or Forgejo itself using their PR system?
    • funkaster 5mo ago
      It's just a PITA to contribute, compared to platforms with wider adoption like github/gitlab.
• tux033 5mo 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 https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183
• kid64 5mo ago
  An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?
• sbinnee 5mo 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 5mo ago
  From FreeBSD to Windows 2000: Microsoft’s Painful Hotmail Migration https://archive.md/KZ0sy https://archive.md/KZ0sy
• ks2048 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • latexr 5mo 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.
• mvkel 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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
• mixmastamyk 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!
• Peaches4Rent 5mo ago
  I blame Agent Smith - Mr. Anderson
• bashtoni 5mo ago
  If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.
• AlienRobot 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.
• aforwardslash 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    • pxc 5mo 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).
      • gfody 5mo ago
        I haven't used azure devops but I used TFS in its heyday and still haven't ever seen a better integrated ticket workflow with fully customizable states and transitions - it's like a mutant hybrid of jira and github but all built into VS. There's definitely something to be said about keeping the primary admin UI in the dev tools.
• fHr 5mo ago
  I reiterate gitlab > github
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• dewey 5mo 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-appoints-new-ceo/ https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...
• pull_my_finger 5mo 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.
• coolThingsFirst 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• xyst 5mo ago
  gh been going down hill since microslop took over. No surprise.
• 0xbadcafebee 5mo 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-recent-service-disruptions/ 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.
  • odie5533 5mo ago
    https://disroot.org/ 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 5mo ago
    We did raise $4.5M recently to build exactly this: https://tangled.org https://tangled.org
    • 0xbadcafebee 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • kelnos 5mo 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.
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• SupLockDef 5mo ago
  Do not forget: "Embrace AI or get out!" [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrace-ai-or-get-out-2025-8?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
  • amai 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
• dewey 5mo 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.
• vadepaysa 5mo 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 5mo ago
    re: #1, Blacksmith (https://blacksmith.sh https://blacksmith.sh) exists and it works pretty well!
    • vadepaysa 5mo ago
      Yes, I pay for blacksmith rn. Thank You for your response though.
  • suryao 5mo 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.
    • vadepaysa 5mo ago
      Thank You, great product. Do you have something for merge queues?
• philipnee 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • kelnos 5mo 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.)
• aorth 5mo ago
  I doom scroll GitHub issues too. :( I'm so addicted to open source hahahahah. I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...
• balex 5mo ago
  I read this and felt like I was reading a moltbook post. Am I an agent? Are you? Is Claude... God?
• gyoridavid 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • singingtoday 5mo ago
    This is fantasticly poetic!
  • CjHuber 5mo ago
    Are you… explaining the effects of being acquired to Hashimoto?
    • nyeah 5mo ago
      But keep in mind the demographics of chat. 80% of the commenters are much smarter and more knowledgeable than the other 80%.
  • franktankbank 5mo ago
    Also they own your code in any real sense.
• versecafe 5mo 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.
• flowdesktech 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• raincole 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
• midtake 5mo 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 5mo ago
  One of the issues is that Github competes with Azure Devops, and MS prefers to push Azure.
• immanuwell 5mo ago
  tldr: chronic outages, near-daily github actions failures blocking real work
• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• erlend_sh 5mo 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.
• aorth 5mo 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 https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html
• nottorp 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Bro was treating github like social media
  • gtfothisplace 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• gbuaeru 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Is there anything less important than the origin URL of a Git repository?
• yangcheng 5mo ago
  github failure is a live lesson of dysfunctional org. A business unit like github need a CEO.
• grougnax 5mo ago
  enshittification, as usual
• tabs_or_spaces 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Microsoft truly is the reverse King Midas!
• QuiCasseRien 5mo ago
  just use https://onedev.io/ https://onedev.io/ ! best dev platform
• wartywhoa23 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives There's probably a few more to be added there now.
  • deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  • shizcakes 5mo ago
    Check your PRs - some major options missing!
• BrenBarn 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  github is very disappionted for me, copilot usage changing is awful
• ianberdin 5mo 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 5mo 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.
    • odie5533 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 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 5mo 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.
• Daffrin 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• ffaser5gxlsll 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930738
• throwatdem12311 5mo 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.
• samiv 5mo 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.
• bfrog 5mo 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.
• bfrog 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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.
  • robeym 5mo 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 5mo 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/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/ [2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-developers-and-counting/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-d... [3] https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-developer-joins-github-every-second-as-ai-leads-typescript-to-1/ https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...
  • ozgrakkurt 5mo 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
• robeym 5mo ago
  Anytime Microsoft buys something it's time to start looking for alternatives
• rurban 5mo 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 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 5mo ago
  Hey! One of the maintainers of Radicle (https://radicle.dev/ 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
  You should be CEO of github or make your own git hub.
• gtfothisplace 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• gtfothisplace 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• peterpanhead 5mo ago
  I remember sourceforge, not as good.
• leadgenman 5mo ago
  [dead]
• sathishmg 5mo 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 5mo ago
  Excited to see what Graphite is cooking: https://x.com/MerrillLutsky/status/2049231503108780405 https://x.com/MerrillLutsky/status/2049231503108780405
• mdnahas 5mo ago
  Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?
• tomerbd 5mo ago
  I didn't get it. Why are they leaving GitHub?
• rodolphoarruda 5mo ago
  [dead]
• m3kw9 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo 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 5mo ago
    Why share any opinion ever?
  • warmwaffles 5mo ago
    Because he wants to move it and then has to provide rationale behind why Ghostty is moving away from Github.
• mgdev 5mo ago
  Mitchell is a bellwether. This is a 'tipping point' situation. Exodus will be a little at a time, then all at once.
• nurettin 5mo 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 5mo 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
• fragmede 5mo ago
  Imagine a world where Google had bought GitHub instead of Microsoft.
  • 4k93n2 5mo ago
    they would have shut it down after 5 years
• ost-ing 5mo 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.
• zhouquanxi 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• PeterStuer 5mo 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.
• amai 5mo ago
  Github is moving to Azure. https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development/ https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173 Might explain at least a part of the issues.