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> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This is true but misleading. Unfortunately. It is a true statement for de

> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better" This is true but misleading. Unfortunately. It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users. There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

stock_toaster 6mo ago
Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".
phillipcarter 6mo ago
Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
  - roastedfunction 6mo ago
    To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions. https://github.com/actions/checkout#note https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
  - phillipcarter 6mo ago
    No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.
    - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.
      - phillipcarter 6mo ago
        Yes, it is the job of users to advocate for the products and platform they use if they want certain use cases to get better and features to be built.
- margalabargala 6mo ago
  This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint. The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies). I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
- jumpconc 6mo ago
  What is your BATNA? If you are going to give them money no matter what they do, they have no reason to listen to your feedback. At all.
goodmythical 6mo ago
I'd honestly argue the opposite. Staying with an abusive partner is not likely to resolve the abuse, no matter how much you think so. Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
- lossyalgo 6mo ago
  I think OP is basically applying "vote with your wallet" strategy and/or some kind of "action speaks louder than words". As I understood from the article, they have been vocal about trying to change things, but they are shouting into the ether since nothing has changed and in fact only getting worse.
  - rob74 6mo ago
    Vote with your wallet, or, if you're not paying anything, your feet.
- meken 6mo ago
  There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.
  - pinkgolem 6mo ago
    I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you
  - zamalek 6mo ago
    Exactly, only humans should have at least one chance to grow and improve. Orgs are heartless legal entities that deserve no loyalty whatsoever, they are all one acquisition away from turning on you (as a customer or an employee).
    - rob74 6mo ago
      Organizations are made up of humans too... but, the bigger they get, the less you notice that. Back in the day when GitHub was still a small company with one (very good) product, I can understand having a feeling of loyalty towards them. Since they are part of M$ and more beholden to M$'s KPIs then to their users, sticking with them only because of nostalgia is probably ill-advised.
idan 6mo ago
I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling. In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop". My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.
- WD-42 6mo ago
  Comparing to twitter is astute, as there are some analysis that point to it being mostly bots in 2025. I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity. Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.
- margalabargala 6mo ago
  I'm glad you are optimistic. GitHub will need employees with that attitude if they're going to pull out of their current trajectory. To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.
  - slowmovintarget 6mo ago
    Security: No leaking PII, no compromised build pipelines. Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).
jomar 6mo ago
Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1] Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better. [1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368
lacker 6mo ago
> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been. I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better. It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term. So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.
- rob74 6mo ago
  The problem is just, you don't pay GitHub for their service, you pay Microsoft for a service called GitHub, and Microsoft will put your money in their "earnings" basket and do whatever they want with it. Not sure if the amount of money Microsoft gets from GitHub subscriptions directly affects how much "love" the GitHub service gets.

stock_toaster 6mo ago

Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".

phillipcarter 6mo ago

Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
- roastedfunction 6mo ago
  To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions. https://github.com/actions/checkout#note https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
- phillipcarter 6mo ago
  No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.
    - phillipcarter 6mo ago
      Yes, it is the job of users to advocate for the products and platform they use if they want certain use cases to get better and features to be built.
margalabargala 6mo ago
This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint. The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.
bombcar 6mo ago
The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies). I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
jumpconc 6mo ago
What is your BATNA? If you are going to give them money no matter what they do, they have no reason to listen to your feedback. At all.

goodmythical 6mo ago

I'd honestly argue the opposite. Staying with an abusive partner is not likely to resolve the abuse, no matter how much you think so. Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.

lossyalgo 6mo ago
I think OP is basically applying "vote with your wallet" strategy and/or some kind of "action speaks louder than words". As I understood from the article, they have been vocal about trying to change things, but they are shouting into the ether since nothing has changed and in fact only getting worse.
- rob74 6mo ago
  Vote with your wallet, or, if you're not paying anything, your feet.
meken 6mo ago
There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.
- pinkgolem 6mo ago
  I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you
- zamalek 6mo ago
  Exactly, only humans should have at least one chance to grow and improve. Orgs are heartless legal entities that deserve no loyalty whatsoever, they are all one acquisition away from turning on you (as a customer or an employee).
  - rob74 6mo ago
    Organizations are made up of humans too... but, the bigger they get, the less you notice that. Back in the day when GitHub was still a small company with one (very good) product, I can understand having a feeling of loyalty towards them. Since they are part of M$ and more beholden to M$'s KPIs then to their users, sticking with them only because of nostalgia is probably ill-advised.

idan 6mo ago

I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling. In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop". My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.

WD-42 6mo ago
Comparing to twitter is astute, as there are some analysis that point to it being mostly bots in 2025. I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity. Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.
margalabargala 6mo ago
I'm glad you are optimistic. GitHub will need employees with that attitude if they're going to pull out of their current trajectory. To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.
- slowmovintarget 6mo ago
  Security: No leaking PII, no compromised build pipelines. Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).

jomar 6mo ago

Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1] Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better. [1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368 https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368

lacker 6mo ago

> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been. I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better. It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term. So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.

rob74 6mo ago
The problem is just, you don't pay GitHub for their service, you pay Microsoft for a service called GitHub, and Microsoft will put your money in their "earnings" basket and do whatever they want with it. Not sure if the amount of money Microsoft gets from GitHub subscriptions directly affects how much "love" the GitHub service gets.