4 ms·

GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere?

64 points by dhruv3006 2mo ago

isoprophlex 2mo ago
What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now, anyway? Microsoft bundling? Name recognition? That it's still the goto place for open source? Existing corpo contracts? - githubs' ci/cd has been pretty crap for me personally (ok there's worse out there but it's definitely not a joyful thing) - The user interface I hate more and more each year. - The availability, well... there's still two nines in there lol - the CLI is not bad, i don't hate that
- IshKebab 2mo ago
  * Free private repos * Free CI, especially Mac & Windows. Find my a competitor that offers that. Until then I think their uptime is going to have to get a lot worse before the majority care.
- petcat 2mo ago
  > What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now 180,000,000 monthly active users
- the__alchemist 2mo ago
  Community; network effects. Also, observe that the competitors all copied it's UI. And on a case-by-case basis, they have drawbacks of their own.
- veqq 2mo ago
  > still two nines Unfortunately, as a codeberg user, codeberg doesn't have 2 9s...
- ehfeng 2mo ago
  i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america. plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.
- jm4 2mo ago
  Probably network effects, integration, just about everyone knows how to use it, high switching cost, the fact that it’s mostly good enough, etc. Even if you switch away from GitHub, you’re probably going to use it for something else anyway. There will be some dependency or something that’s still on there or you might use it for discovery. Then you have to spend time and money migrating to something else for what? Comparable features and interface? Maybe avoid a few minutes of downtime every month? Migrating a team might cost the equivalent of years of downtime. Or host it yourself to spend more of your own time and maybe get a worse result? Really, what does downtime cost anyway when you are using a distributed version control system? It’s not like you don’t have access to the code. You might not have access to issues or CI for a few minutes. So what? It’s annoying, but is switching really worth it? And what else is out there? Gitlab? Gitea? BTW, that’s the dumbest name ever for a product. I wouldn’t use it just so I don’t have to say that word. Are either of those enough of an improvement to justify the time? Or host Forgejo? Now you’re in the hosting business and only have yourself to blame when it inevitably goes down. It’s easier to just use GitHub even if GitHub isn’t great.
nerdypepper 2mo ago
we need to break free from monocultures: https://blog.tangled.org/federation/ https://blog.tangled.org/federation/
everyday7732 2mo ago
Would a diaspora from GitHub be that bad? I don't see particularly big benefits from having every project being hosted in one place. Monopolies with network effects tend to enshittify.
ghewgill 2mo ago
Yes, let's look beyond centralized services for source control (also known as "developer social media"). For example, Forgejo is working on federation (https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...) which makes the choice of where to host your code less relevant, because anybody on the federated network will be able to interact with any other repository no matter where it is hosted. The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.
- __xor_eax_eax 2mo ago
  Is Mastodon successful?
  - ehfeng 2mo ago
    (copy paste hedged definition of success)
  - graceful6800 2mo ago
    Depends on how carefully selected and considered your criterion for success is. It accomplished what it set out to do, which was not "make obscene piles of money" but since they didn't make obscene piles of money it probably is a failure anyway, right?
    - 398642258909 2mo ago
      A peak of 2.6 million active users 4 years ago and the decline since then to 750k users is a true success story, right?
      - graceful6800 2mo ago
        That's what I meant by carefully selected and ill-thought-out criterion. They didn't set out with the goal of making gobs of money or subsuming the entire online population, and because those things didn't happen, success is tautologically ruled out, right? After all, as we all know, the only kind of success that is even theoretically possible is being the best and only player left alive in your field. Literally anything less is failure, unqualified and unequivocal. Mastodon did what they set out to do and there's a vibrant community around it. That's a success, even if it doesn't meet narrow-minded silicon valley definitions of success.
felipeheredia 2mo ago
I really want to move my personal code away from GitHub, but I really don't know an alternative that will be as good as GitHub to serve as a Portfolio and a good service. Maybe Codeberg or GitLab, I really don't know
- ktpsns 2mo ago
  For portfolio and service only, virtually any GH alternative discussed here will do it. Even a self-hosted cgit or static page git browser will do it for read-only.
minraws 2mo ago
For community projects it's hard to manage user accounts and stuff.
imnes 2mo ago
If the problem really stems from capacity issues and the unexpected growth rate, maybe the way forward is further limiting / throttling capacity to free tier users, and increased costs for paid users to allow more expansion (in compute / personnel). Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.
- burnto 2mo ago
  > Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads. Yes, I’m curious just how much of the scaling issues might be self-inflicted. Also I’d like to see the distribution of usage. I’m guessing a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.
  - baal80spam 2mo ago
    > a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load. Probably 20/80 (Pareto) principle.
pcan77 2mo ago
Nah, it's great for coffee breaks IMO. Not everything needs to be perfect. Honestly every dev I know rejoices when GH goes down because it gives them a much needed and deserved break lol.
- mrbnprck 2mo ago
  Feels a bit like the eletricity outage in spain where people had a brief moment where they actually got off the internet phone and enjoyed real-life.
ChrisArchitect 2mo ago
Recently: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365 Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611
jurassic 2mo ago
Today everyone's talking about the availability problems, but GitHub has a much bigger problem which is that its way of modeling work is not aligned with how people need to work with agents. I think the social value of GitHub has always been really overblown, and now it's actually an Achilles heel. Now that we know prompt injection is such a massive risk, it seems insane to allow members of the public to leave comments on issues and pull requests that your agents may see. Which means the way that open source interacts with the public needs to fundamentally change away from the open GitHub model and towards a model of trusted contribution only. Feedback from the public has to come through carefully monitored channels that we can be sure our agents are not gonna pick up and run with. Public comment has to be kept totally segregated from our trusted work queue, which is how many people treat GitHub issues. We just simply can't have people, including malicious actors, able to drop a comment any and everywhere they want. I'm honestly astonished that GitHub hasn't even taken the most basic step of allowing you to create a read-only public repository with no commenting functionality.
- surgical_fire 2mo ago
  This is only a problem if you have agents working from public comments and issues. Why would you do such a thing?
  - jurassic 2mo ago
    There's currently no way to have a private issue queue associated with a public project. This is exactly the sort of structural problem with the product that I'm talking about. They make it very easy to do dangerous things and very hard, if not impossible, to work securely. Even if you didn't have an agent work off public issues, there's nothing stopping a malicious user from dropping a comment on your pull request. If an auto-fix agent read that comment and incorrectly took action on it, you're hosed. That's exactly the story we saw today with Snowflake.
ahouronthis 2mo ago
There's molecule.arweave.net, which makes Arweave (decentralized permanent storage) a git remote, and generates a wallet identity on first run. Good for agents to collaborate on branches without UI-based fiddling.

64 points by dhruv3006 2mo ago

What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now, anyway? Microsoft bundling? Name recognition? That it's still the goto place for open source? Existing corpo contracts? - githubs' ci/cd has been pretty crap for me personally (ok there's worse out there but it's definitely not a joyful thing) - The user interface I hate more and more each year. - The availability, well... there's still two nines in there lol - the CLI is not bad, i don't hate that

IshKebab 2mo ago
* Free private repos * Free CI, especially Mac & Windows. Find my a competitor that offers that. Until then I think their uptime is going to have to get a lot worse before the majority care.
petcat 2mo ago
> What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now 180,000,000 monthly active users
the__alchemist 2mo ago
Community; network effects. Also, observe that the competitors all copied it's UI. And on a case-by-case basis, they have drawbacks of their own.
veqq 2mo ago
> still two nines Unfortunately, as a codeberg user, codeberg doesn't have 2 9s...
ehfeng 2mo ago
i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america. plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.
jm4 2mo ago
Probably network effects, integration, just about everyone knows how to use it, high switching cost, the fact that it’s mostly good enough, etc. Even if you switch away from GitHub, you’re probably going to use it for something else anyway. There will be some dependency or something that’s still on there or you might use it for discovery. Then you have to spend time and money migrating to something else for what? Comparable features and interface? Maybe avoid a few minutes of downtime every month? Migrating a team might cost the equivalent of years of downtime. Or host it yourself to spend more of your own time and maybe get a worse result? Really, what does downtime cost anyway when you are using a distributed version control system? It’s not like you don’t have access to the code. You might not have access to issues or CI for a few minutes. So what? It’s annoying, but is switching really worth it? And what else is out there? Gitlab? Gitea? BTW, that’s the dumbest name ever for a product. I wouldn’t use it just so I don’t have to say that word. Are either of those enough of an improvement to justify the time? Or host Forgejo? Now you’re in the hosting business and only have yourself to blame when it inevitably goes down. It’s easier to just use GitHub even if GitHub isn’t great.

nerdypepper 2mo ago

we need to break free from monocultures: https://blog.tangled.org/federation/ https://blog.tangled.org/federation/

everyday7732 2mo ago

Would a diaspora from GitHub be that bad? I don't see particularly big benefits from having every project being hosted in one place. Monopolies with network effects tend to enshittify.

ghewgill 2mo ago

Yes, let's look beyond centralized services for source control (also known as "developer social media"). For example, Forgejo is working on federation (https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...) which makes the choice of where to host your code less relevant, because anybody on the federated network will be able to interact with any other repository no matter where it is hosted. The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.

__xor_eax_eax 2mo ago
Is Mastodon successful?
- ehfeng 2mo ago
  (copy paste hedged definition of success)
- graceful6800 2mo ago
  Depends on how carefully selected and considered your criterion for success is. It accomplished what it set out to do, which was not "make obscene piles of money" but since they didn't make obscene piles of money it probably is a failure anyway, right?
  - 398642258909 2mo ago
    A peak of 2.6 million active users 4 years ago and the decline since then to 750k users is a true success story, right?
    - graceful6800 2mo ago
      That's what I meant by carefully selected and ill-thought-out criterion. They didn't set out with the goal of making gobs of money or subsuming the entire online population, and because those things didn't happen, success is tautologically ruled out, right? After all, as we all know, the only kind of success that is even theoretically possible is being the best and only player left alive in your field. Literally anything less is failure, unqualified and unequivocal. Mastodon did what they set out to do and there's a vibrant community around it. That's a success, even if it doesn't meet narrow-minded silicon valley definitions of success.

felipeheredia 2mo ago

I really want to move my personal code away from GitHub, but I really don't know an alternative that will be as good as GitHub to serve as a Portfolio and a good service. Maybe Codeberg or GitLab, I really don't know

ktpsns 2mo ago
For portfolio and service only, virtually any GH alternative discussed here will do it. Even a self-hosted cgit or static page git browser will do it for read-only.

minraws 2mo ago

For community projects it's hard to manage user accounts and stuff.

imnes 2mo ago

If the problem really stems from capacity issues and the unexpected growth rate, maybe the way forward is further limiting / throttling capacity to free tier users, and increased costs for paid users to allow more expansion (in compute / personnel). Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.

burnto 2mo ago
> Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads. Yes, I’m curious just how much of the scaling issues might be self-inflicted. Also I’d like to see the distribution of usage. I’m guessing a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.
- baal80spam 2mo ago
  > a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load. Probably 20/80 (Pareto) principle.

pcan77 2mo ago

Nah, it's great for coffee breaks IMO. Not everything needs to be perfect. Honestly every dev I know rejoices when GH goes down because it gives them a much needed and deserved break lol.

mrbnprck 2mo ago
Feels a bit like the eletricity outage in spain where people had a brief moment where they actually got off the internet phone and enjoyed real-life.

ChrisArchitect 2mo ago

Recently: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365 Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611

jurassic 2mo ago

Today everyone's talking about the availability problems, but GitHub has a much bigger problem which is that its way of modeling work is not aligned with how people need to work with agents. I think the social value of GitHub has always been really overblown, and now it's actually an Achilles heel. Now that we know prompt injection is such a massive risk, it seems insane to allow members of the public to leave comments on issues and pull requests that your agents may see. Which means the way that open source interacts with the public needs to fundamentally change away from the open GitHub model and towards a model of trusted contribution only. Feedback from the public has to come through carefully monitored channels that we can be sure our agents are not gonna pick up and run with. Public comment has to be kept totally segregated from our trusted work queue, which is how many people treat GitHub issues. We just simply can't have people, including malicious actors, able to drop a comment any and everywhere they want. I'm honestly astonished that GitHub hasn't even taken the most basic step of allowing you to create a read-only public repository with no commenting functionality.

surgical_fire 2mo ago
This is only a problem if you have agents working from public comments and issues. Why would you do such a thing?
- jurassic 2mo ago
  There's currently no way to have a private issue queue associated with a public project. This is exactly the sort of structural problem with the product that I'm talking about. They make it very easy to do dangerous things and very hard, if not impossible, to work securely. Even if you didn't have an agent work off public issues, there's nothing stopping a malicious user from dropping a comment on your pull request. If an auto-fix agent read that comment and incorrectly took action on it, you're hosed. That's exactly the story we saw today with Snowflake.

ahouronthis 2mo ago

There's molecule.arweave.net, which makes Arweave (decentralized permanent storage) a git remote, and generates a wallet identity on first run. Good for agents to collaborate on branches without UI-based fiddling.