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.
It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)
My version of your post reads differently:
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.
I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.
In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.
I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".
For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.
Yes, sure! OP didn't say that there aren't alternatives or that the alternatives aren't any good, they just said that GitHub is so huge it will probably continue to remain relevant, no matter how bad it gets. And they have a point - X is one example, but even SourceForge (remember SourceForge?) is still around, despite being an undeniably shitty platform that tried to install adware on their user's computers.
But OP did say the alternatives were “so much more complicated”. If you showed a new dev both GitHub and Forgejo, I’m not sure they’d notice the differences other than the latter being much faster for many common operations. It and Codeberg aren’t more complicated in any tangible way.
If GitHub’s internal thinking were “well at least we’re easier than Codeberg”, then they may find that the moat isn’t nearly so deep as they might hope.
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.
I may have my timelines wrong but I don't remember github being rock solid 5 years ago. I remember multiple outages keeping us from pulling code for go packages that were not using an enterprise dependency cache and killing multiple days of work a year for those systems. It's what I used as a forcing function to move people TO an enterprise dependency cache, and to find the few scofflaws running work code off of github.com versus enterprise.
Another line on that graph should probably be "January 7, 2019: GitHub offers unlimited free private repos". I can't imagine that helps with service stability.
There is no way Github had 100% uptime prior to the MS acquisition. Nobody has 100% uptime 100% of the time. They must have changed how they were measuring uptime.
Can you explain more of what you mean by "wild" here?
I never worked on any SaaS that had such high uptime. It seems pretty good to me. In 10 years, it was always better than 99.5% uptime. That seems impressive to me for a huge, complex SaaS like GitHub.
Feels like a pretty wildly misleading graph. What do they say about lies, damned lies and statistics?
This graph is literally designed to abuse correlation =/= causation by attaching the arbitrary label "microsoft acquires github" so that the reader will apply causation to the uptime.
Now let's overlay ontop of the uptime graph a few lines of: # of monthly active users, # of monthly commits, size of PRs, action minutes per PR (whatever demonstrates scaling)
Something tells me that the uptime issues follow scale more than they do ownership... but that's not the narrative that this chart was designed for...
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.
> 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".
This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.
GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.
Lack of knowledge about something can certainly make it seem horrid. It just means you have a lot to learn. There is a reason so many of us engineers with decades of experience in Windows, MacOS (and OSX), and Linux use a Macbook Pro as our daily driver.
That is a really really shitty comment. Because their choice is different to yours they have a lack of knowledge?
FYI I had a top class developer working for me about 5 years ago, who saw me using WSL and VScode... they had a Windows machine and several macs due to the nature if their work. A week later they were on Windows every day, only using apple for apple builds.
The answer is, we don't all do the same kind of work. There is a reason so many engineers working in your field use mac. Guessing you are a Web developer?
It's funny you say this because the more I learned about mac the more I understood its limitations in being as good an operating system as e.g. Arch.
I know a lot of engineers. Some daily osx, some daily Linux. I'm not seeing any particular correlation in knowledge or skill - except perhaps slightly in the osx people's disfavor.
Maybe you can install homebrew and open source apps to make it more Linux like, but you'll still be stuck with Mac OS's shonky window and task management UI unfortunately.
Install SizeUp. I paid $10 10 years ago and have been using it ever since. Far better window management than any Linux distro I've used. (and better than windows but that's not saying much)
I like Divvy because it supports more than just halves and quarters — I use a 7×6 grid so my browser can be wider than my editor and terminal: https://mizage.com/divvy/
Pairs well with Stay to make windows automatically return to their assigned layout when plugging/unplugging my external display: https://cordlessdog.com/stay/
I found that part ironic and tone deaf as well. Like, read the room buddy. France just announced they're officially moving from Windows to Linux. The country of France. I think OP is looking for a single lynchpin moment where things change from one way to the other. Where in reality, things rarely happen that way. It's a slow and steady shifting away from one thing towards another.
I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.
- They ditched their previous android app for a new one that doesn't get the grandfathered accessibility access so autofill is mostly useless...
- On mac, safari integration is consistently flaky. It regularly keeps getting blocked in a loop telling me to unlock 1password when 1password has already been unlocked.
- Passkeys are unreliable to the point of being unusable
- Autofill frequently doesn't work well where for some reason the site with the same url as saved in 1password is not offered during autofill. When 1password used to work, it helped catch phishing attempts because it wouldn't show autofill on pages that do not match. Nowadays because of the shitty autofill, people get trained to go to the app, copy the password and paste it in the website. This means that it will no longer protect from phishing attempts
- The previous behaviour of saving any newly generated password as a password object (not login) was much better. Now newly generated passwords are only available in the password history of the browser extension you specifically used.
- I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website
At this point, the only reason I'm not using bitwarden is that search is very slow on it with 2k+ passwords.
When I quit using 1Password, it was when they dumped native apps for electron apps and quit supporting the product I’d been buying upgrades for every couple years, in order to pivot to a cloud model that lets them imposing an enterprise subscription model for enterprise users onto individuals. Dunno what they’re up to these days, but I’d be shocked if they could last six months without enterprise customers, so I know I’m not relevant to them anymore. And that’s the same way I view GitHub — individuals are financially and strategically irrelevant to their bottom line.
It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.
Just to add a dissenting voice to all the complainers:
- autofill on desktop is rock-solid, it virtually never fails, much less so than any other password manager autofill
- it works great with passkeys, again rock-solid, and again the best UX of any password manager. passkeys itself are also great
- OTP code integration (only use this for non-important stuff) works great too, again best-in-class
- switch to Electron was great for most, the Windows app sucked and there was nothing on Linux, now we have a good application across all 3 desktop platforms, although it was a slight downgrade for Mac users
- autofill works fine on Android 99% of the time
- 1Password CLI and SSH agent are interesting additions but SSH has a lot of paper cuts
In general, they have by far the nicest UX and UI of all password managers. And they really seem to care. They were the first to introduce stuff like "no automatic autofill" because of security implications, their vault spec is open source (in case they go belly up), they get audited regularly. They were the first to add passkeys and actually made a site (name escapes me) that shows which services have passkeys and how to activate them.
I can't globally disable that "autofill" also hits "submit". I want to review what it autofills before I submit. I consider this a security risk. I can disable submit only on a login-by-login basis, and my coworkers are able to reenable it again. I can't globally disable it for myself.
This setting does exist for "Universal Autofill" [1] which is what I use instead of any browser extensions because I don't want to get phished when I'm not at my best. [2] [3]
On the Mac app, the setting is at the bottom of the General settings screen.
The downside to forgoing the browser extensions is that creating new logins is painfully manual. The risks of using the extensions just freak me out too much.
Painfully manual. Every time I have to delete the word "Login" when creating new login, I wonder how hard could it be to vibecode myself what I want. I fantasize about getting a job there to fix the UX issues and then quit.
FYI I recently discovered a 1p browser extension feature named “Password Generator History”. It has a record of all generated passwords, whether their respective items ever ended up saved or not. Live saver.
Same here. I paid for my family's accounts for many years until the app suddenly became much worse. Honestly, Apple's own Passwords app has 95% of the features of, and the ones it does have work far better than the 1P equivalent. I can't imagine paying for a personal account again.
It’s getting buggier and buggier, not being able to fill in passwords properly is kind of a glaring omission of a password manager (and that’s on three different computers).
They keep adding features but seem to show little interest in fixing bugs. I submitted debug logs, recorded videos etc but it just trickled out in the sand. And as another poster wrote, it all started going bad with the switch to Electron (might be the rust backend that is the problem, I don’t know and frankly don’t care, it just doesn’t work as well as it did before).
Not the parent, but the only thing I really hate about 1Password is that I can't tell it to never offer to save a specific site's password. I can turn off all offers to save passwords, or I can have the stupid pop-up ask me multiple times a day if I want to save that password. The pop-up chases me across the site until I get rid of it. Aarrgh. Blood boiling. Rage overflowing.
I have the same issue when using Google Passwords. One specific example: Many of my bank websites require 2FA with a code via email, SMS, or token. Each time, Google Chrome asks me if I want to update the password with the 2FA token. I have no idea how to disable it. Am I doing something wrong?
I have the same complaint about lastpass. With lastpass it's doable, but I have to keep looking up how to configure a site to never site and never ask.
Speaking of a "year of Linux on desktop", it's mostly not happening because the desktop lock-in has largely eased. I of course love my Linux desktop, but I use relatively few native applications, and every one of them is multiplatform now. Windows desktop becomes less and less relevant in its own way, by degradation of experience, and by being replaced with consoles and the Steam Deck.
Same may happen to GitHub. CI/CD tools and workflows can become more portable and adaptable. Independent code review tools that can use GitHub API along with a few other APIs may become popular. GitHub will become one of, not the one. I won't call it a bad outcome.
Honestly many companies would do well to use these services. I think we get too much into the idea our apps need the same guarantees as the large products out there. Define your SLAs and then choose the platform.
Windows 1.0, I believe. Xerox PARC invented the WIMP UI paradigm (windows, icons, menus, pointer), Apple commercialised it first, and then Microsoft copied Apple.
Who's this random somebody that has a copy of your code that you don't want shared or trained on? GitHub's no saint here, but it seems like that somebody is an issue, not GitHub.
Until now there was never a reason to have a permissive software license that tries to restrict where the recipients can store the code, because this is a new issue. My software is AGPLv3 but I'd rather just stop sharing my code entirely than let these corpos profit from my work for free. Mirroring onto GitHub is very very common since GitHub is frequently accessible in network environments where random others forges may not be.
It is actuly good for the ecosystem to have competition. Githubs quasi monopoly was a bad thing. And will continue to be a bad thing in the future if it remains
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
None of the alternatives you cited are as complicated as GitHub. Also, GitHub started with this Actions bullshit which is just reinventing the CI wheel and overcomplicating stuff that was already made simple. The one thing I hate Forgejo about is for being compatible with Actions and promoting is as the way to go for CI, when you have much better alternatives like Woodpecker, where you can actually understand the underlying code for your CI/CD pipelines.
The problem is that from the outside it seems like Microsoft no longer cares about the product. So much so that "the product" has become "shareholders"[0].
We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.
We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.
In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...
I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.
Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.
An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
Believe it or not, some companies are run by people who just want to sell widgets and get on with life. Some of them even have morals! Shocking, I know. Smaller companies, sure, but they'll still pay you a good living wage anywhere but SV. Not every boss is a megalomaniac.
I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
I would argue it goes even a step further: any org the size of Microsoft struggles to maintain the quality of... well, anything. And, added to that, Microsoft seems exceptionally bad at doing fucking anything now. Azure is a complete mess, Windows is an utter dumpster fire, the office suite feels like it gets just slightly worse with every update, Copilot is a fucking joke compared to every other AI on offer (and hilariously, will agree with everything I've said here!), they won't even use their own frameworks to develop software anymore!
Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.
They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.
This issue of large organizations making shitty products seems to infect every company except for a handful. Even Google, with all its good intensions, by 2010 was full of political animals climbing ever higher on the corporate ladder while management struggled to set incentives correctly to make the company product focused.
Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.
Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).
Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.
It does not deserve to get better.
It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.
Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]
GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.
You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.
It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
Did Heroku ever actively degrade? Seems more like it was neglected until the competition eclipsed it entirely. What GitHub is doing seems worse, like true active regression.
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.
GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.
Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example:
- The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself.
- The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did not need to happen. Its badness has nothing to do with how many users use it. It’s just bad in a no-scaling-involved way.
- GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards."
No, it did not have to expand into the AI field. A competent AI-free GitHub Core that could have an optional AI layer on top would have worked just fine if not dramatically better than the current mess.
(I say this as a paying user who will probably cancel soon. The Copilot reviews are kind of nice, but they’re not any better than a third-party system, and I’m getting sick of GitHub not working. Plus, the repos I’ve already migrated off of GitHub get to have nice non-AI things like gasp service accounts.)
> GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better
There might not have been a predecessor, but it's been obvious for at least a decade that GHA are a very poorly designed programming language, yet nothing was done to improve. They introduced Github Apps that solve many of the issues with Actions, but that requires deploying a service and aren't anywhere near the ease of use of Actions.
Amusing new observation due to today’s outage [0]: apparently GitHub never bothered to do the obvious optimization to the /pulls page: when you load it with the default “is:pr is:open”, they seem to be depending on their heavyweight search service, despite the fact that their normal API can enumerate open PRs just fine (and probably at dramatically lower cost to them). Sometimes the common case of a webpage should be simple instead of a relying on something fancy.
Im an outsider and a layman, so this might be totally off base, but...
The way I hear people talking about github reliability doesnt sound like scaling problems to me. If you drive 20 miles every day but then decide to drive 2000 miles and run out of gas, thats a problem of scale. If you drive 2000 miles and your engine explodes, thats a problem of design.
Maybe their design problems are being made evident because of sudden scale, but they're still design problems.
I think the fair side of this is that you have to make tradeoffs when you design things. Scaling problems are design problems, but whether they were mistakes or not really depends on how predictable that scaling was.
Car analogies are typical, so I'll add in there.
My car can take the four of us, and we can load it up with things from the shops. I can put a bunch of heavy tins of food in there, or some DIY things, but if I put several tons of stones in the boot it'll totally fuck it up.
Is that a design problem?
Not really, it's a relatively cheap regular car, and it failed at a certain scale.
It would be a design problem if it were a flatbed truck, despite it being the same scaling that showed the problem.
Making my car resilient enough to take that weight would require tradeoffs that would either make it worse for other jobs I want it to do or at least add significantly to the cost.
This is similar in engineering software systems too, you can make it handle scaling up better, but this can require a much more complex architecture that may make it slower at smaller scales. It can make it more complicated to work with, add additional risks of failure as well.
I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.
> What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be.
Yes, and what Github wants public github.com to be is free QA for Github Enterprise. My company is a paying customer with 200 engineers and it's pretty clear we're just Guinea pigs for the Enterprise product.
Isn't this the massive problem? You're trying to do everything, and you can't, and you're trying to do it for everyone all at once, and have tied it all together so much that scaling up gets worse. If it's more than twice as hard to cope with twice the use, then you have to charge a bunch more to customers as you grow - and that's for your customers to get no actual benefit.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
The experience has degraded. It's really, really bad. I've seen companies spending thousands and thousands of dollars weekly in developer time *hitting rerun on broken actions*. It's so expensive to start with then so expensive in how awful it is to use.
Something I really don't get I guess is what out of all of this actually needs to be cross-project. How much of my github use needs access to something that isn't running on the same machine? I worked with a team building things actively, maybe 20 devs? That's not really a large set of users. Let's say 10 devs with the workload of 20, the cheapest plan would be $40/mo, enterprise would be ~$200. Would ten heavy users really max out a 64GB ram, 6+8 core new i5 with dual nvme drives, a gigabit connection and unlimited traffic? That's about $40 at hetzner for a box.
I'm not arguing a big federated position, I just don't really get why some of these enormous companies need to be so centralised. It feels like the problem is trying to be a big interlinked thing, and failing at it. The only things I can think of are
1. Links between issues
2. Accounts
3. Search
The first is mostly solved with literally just links, accounts isn't a huge problem and search is fair enough - but search is utterly awful and I cannot find things within one single repo or organisation reliably. So global stuff is irrelevant.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up
If github persists in being utterly shit for developers, it won't be around to find out. I'm not sure at all what part of the AI stuff needs to make everything else bad, and I'm extremely bullish on AI and agentic coding.
To really hammer this last point home, as agentic coding means we can do a lot more and faster - the unreliability of github has become much more apparent and impactful. Unreliable tests, unreliable code pulling and pushing, unreliable diffs. You're making the agents jobs harder, making the devs jobs harder exactly in the place they now spend much more time.
It makes github dramatically more expensive as a place to work. Also just really fucking annoying.
I think the general answer is that it would take real development effort to make federation work, and having to have compatibilty with other installations slows down your own pace of possible features -- I think these things are undeniable. Arguably worth it for society/the community (I wish we had more open standard federation and less centralization), but from the point of view of the company will it actually lead to increased profits sufficient to justify? In fact, it may do the opposite, if you are one of the largest, then lock-in is better for your profitability. Compatibility with other services is only important for the small upstarts trying to get customers from the largest.
I don't like it, but I think we will get proprietary centralization as long as we have capitalism of the sort we have.
I get what you mean, I think what I'm pretty stuck on is what is the centralisation solving? Federated messages dealing with lots of things flowing back and forth and live updates, etc is one thing - but what is it about GH that makes much of a difference when things are in one place or many? Much of the work is done in very isolated sections.
Imagine each organisation/user was run with completely isolated data, and you used something like google sign in for auth (so one global sign in, then oauth).
What wouldn't work? Global search, that I get. I struggle to think of other things though. Maybe whether links between issues across orgs updates? Every commit, diff, code browser, permissions for writing, reading, org level search, stars, would work with zero federated sort of search-y things. Package management, issue tracking, all that would be the same.
Forks followed by PRs? Not sure that would be much different - maybe you'd have to raise an issue on the original project with a link to your new repo & branch.
Some of my attraction to github is just that I am used to and like the UI, and I get annoyed on another platform where I don't understand the UI and don't know where to find things or how to do things (like set up free CI for open source project, or debug existing CI for a PR).
Other than that... auto-linking to issues, prs, and code (with auto-expansion of excerpt in issue) cross-project is nice?
But you are right, git is theoretically something where separate projects are fairly isolated, which does make it more mysterious that competitors are having trouble and it seems like github has some kind of network effect lock-in anyway. It's a good question.
> It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.
At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.
People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.
I am aware, and I am often the one making that point -- but here we have someone who worked at heroku saying he experienced the SalesForce acquisition as immediately negative and with signals that it was not going to get better and this caused him to leave, so I was discussing within that narrative. I was more intersted in learning about his take from his experience than in trying to tell him he was wrong and salesforce was great for heroku despite his experience working there?
But yes, heroku from the outside kept doing quite well for the first years of Salesforce ownership, whether becuase they let them alone and kept their budget going, or whatever. That's why I suggested that from the outside github's slide was much faster.
idan (who again, tells us they worked at heroku) replied to me in this thread:
> Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
> It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
At the point we're quoting other people's replies in other parts of the thread becuase we're not all even having the same conversation anymore, we're probably done!
Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.
Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.
The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:
author = comment.author
user = User.find(author.id)
Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"
TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.
Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.
I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.
In fact now I think about it my claim to fame used to be that Github used one of my Rails plugins. I had written a really simple versioning system (Rails 2 I think) that I used for my blog and they used it, IIRC, for versioning wiki pages.
When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)
Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.
I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.
I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.
Hah! I was too. I was at a bar with Chris trying to convince him to base the company off of hg instead of git but they already had the domain name and had already started building it.
Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!
No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.
For comparison, I'm 208,820 and we're in the same year: I got that number 2010-02-23. So GitHub more than doubled user count that year, impressive for a "late to the party" growth.
I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.
All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).
If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products.
The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.
This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.
The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.
The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.
You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.
So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?
> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.
Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.
Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."
Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!
In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.
Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.
I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.
> Occam's razor applies here
I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.
I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.
Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).
Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).
I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not.
I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.
And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
The problem is that you decided the correct place for your “version of his post” was in the comments to his version of his post. This rhetorically implies you’re offering your version as an alternative to his, and it explicitly sets up your version as a comment on his version.
And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.
I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.
I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.
But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.
the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.
Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.
Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is:
It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.
Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.
Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.
> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale
Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.
Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap
What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.
“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)
> My version of your post reads differently:
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
> Walking away would be easy.
Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.
Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!
Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.
Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?
The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.
Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda
It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.
I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services.
Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
> Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize?
My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount.
Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.
I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.
Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.
I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.
Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.
I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.
Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.
Good luck, and we're all counting on you.
(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.
So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.
I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)
First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
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?
I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
The hidden cost to competing in these industries is insane. Its so hard to build a physical product that can compete against a giant like IKEA. You need to make some with less r&d, less automation, less infrastructure and you're going to sell less units and all that needs to be price competitive against something that is made on an production line with a team of experienced engineers and sold to millions at fine margins.
That depends, doesn't it? If I make it, it costs time instead of money. (Costs of tools are amortized over all the things I might make.) If I get it from IKEA, it costs money instead of time.
> It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.
I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
By lowering cost and not investing profit to the company? Yes, short-term v long-term, but who in this world cares about anything after their next salary?
If you have the choice to sell out or not sell out, the only logical decision is to sell out, because then you'll have lots of money and one presumes the product wasn't emotionally important to you. You can then move on to making your next product.
Couldn't have said it better. Whatever else you want to build in life will be exponentially easier if you sell out first, and many builders have many things they want to build and not just one.
Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
DNS is the cause of all problems, but it's also the solution - just like anyone can run Apache or Nginx, so should anyone be able to run a git setup. Then it scales really well, as everyone is doing their own thing on their own domains.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
You don't need this. git and a local drive. git and a shared drive. git and an https engine (can be a plugin to apache/nginx, not a full github like solution). git and ssh but people use username/password.
> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.
Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.
My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the enshittification I cannot change
the courage to improve the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.
We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it.
People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.
It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
One way it's possible is if the US ditches the two party system. We are starting to see some cracks in the partition recently with the Epstein files and the Israeli genocide. People from both sides are starting to realize they share a lot of common ground.
Leaving aside the reductionism, the difference is that we are already seeing the effects of the "bad weather" and we all lived through [1] (and, to a point, are still feeling the effects of) the "flu". No "ifs" about it.
There's no need to worry about a threat that has been theorized for 70 years (and may very well never happen) when there are actual, real catastrophes happening right now.
[1] Well, except for those who didn't make it through. They are not here by definition, but their memory is still fresh.
> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.
And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel.
I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.
It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.
>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?
Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.
Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.
Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.
React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
> React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing
Yes, it does.
> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.
It's also not tautological that React apps have bad error handling. You can do proper error handling and retry logic in React, and I can't for the life of me understand why GitHub engineers making several hundred thousand a year in cash and at least that much in stock simply... don't?
It's no wonder my jobs feed is flooded with senior engineering positions at GitHub (one wonders if they're growing, or jettisoning dead weight) but I can't imagine it's a good look for the resume to put GitHub on it at this point.
What's hilarious about that script is that the solution is so simple: use a less-than comparison instead of an equals. That's really, really all it would have taken to fix the issue. And yet https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157 was opened on 2024-02-17 and was merged on 2025-08-21, a full 18 months (plus a few days) later! It took literally 18 months for them to merge a bugfix that is trivially obvious to see is correct.
Yeah, the problems at GitHub ran (and still run) deep.
P.S. Yes, there are busy-wait issues in that code, which should have been addressed by bringing back the check for the `sleep` command and using it if available, falling back on the CPU-burning busy-wait only if `sleep` was unavailable. But the most revealing thing is the 18 months to merge a trivial-to-verify PR. That, more than the bad busy-wait loop, is the fundamental indicator of brokenness at GitHub under Microsoft's ownership.
This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be.
This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.
If you think it requires "brilliance" to figure out that Github Actions is really bad, and/or that "the industry writ large" always makes good decisions, you might be the problem!
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3]
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
Pull Requests is the thing that was wacky in the UI yesterday, coincidence or not? I have no idea.
Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.
Also, the browser back and forward buttons no longer work in pull requests when going between PR tabs (commits, checks, files changed, etc) as well as some other site interactions.
Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.
Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification:
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
I don't think companies know how to make a good product any more. Conway's law won this battle.
I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.
When is the "get better" step? I've only ever seen two things happen mid- or post-enshittification:
1. The company builds a moat and just remains shit.
2. New entrants either displace the company entirely (most likely) or competition slows the enshittification process (distant second) or reverses it (almost never).
It's not clear to me why "get shitty" is a necessary step to this. What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service that randomly prevents people from working"?
> What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service
What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.
The enshittification process milks the current product of all of the money that can be wrung from it by any means just shy of immolation.
Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.
That's why "get shitty" is necessary.
When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.
It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.
Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.
I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.
The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.
Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before.
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
I don't know if it's just because I was young and bright eyed, but it seems like the "passionate nerd" is somewhat absent in modern tech orgs. Seems like, starting around 6 years ago, none of the new hires seem to give a fuck about anything anymore.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
I'm still optimistic. I think the number hasn't gone down, just the ratio. Software still offers a relatively well paid and comfortable career, so you naturally get people who just want to do a good job and that's it. Nothing wrong with that.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
Github is going around boasting how many PRs they generate a day with Copilot with very limited human input. Whether that's true or not, it might have effect.
When did every company become a feature factory? Was tech ever not like this, or is it just how it works? It seems like they all end up this way, and it's really dumb.
Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.
It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
Spool of Wire Guy or Wiregate refers to a viral video of a man (named Dan) telling his wife (Cindy) that a spool of wire he's had for 40 years is almost at its end
The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner.
I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It's annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they're reflections on years past.
That is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).
On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.
PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.
To be honest, the blog post is quite a lot of self-indulgent waffle. But I forgive you for that, "each to their own", as they say.
What I won't forgive you for is writing such a long blog post and then completely missing the bottom-line.
Do not write "I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months".
If you're going to make me read such a long blog post, then at least have an answer ready-to-go for the critical question that everybody is going to ask !
I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.
Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.
If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.
Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.
There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.
I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).
KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system.
For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn't work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...
Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you're emotional about it says more about how much you gave to that platform than anything else.
Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!
So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me:
> Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year
How could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?
I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook.
And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years.
So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.
We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.
You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.
You sure did keep it up.
Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.
Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”
… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.
> Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.
Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)
You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.
my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.
I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.
I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message.
It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!
Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.
The same thing happened to Twitter. All the online properties we used will be gutted and sunsetted eventually. The only thing we can do is move on and slash and burn a new pasture.
This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.
> I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.
I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused.
Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?
It's probably not GitHub as such, but the associated memories and experiences. You never miss a place, you miss the feeling of happines you had when you were there, or the people you spent time with there.
People get emotional over a car, over a house, over a pet... you could argue for everything it's just a car/house/pet... you can get a new one.
I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It's the meaning behind it: the hacker spirit, the naive curiosity, the juveline freedom, being destroyed by the corporate machine. It is a small metaphor that hits all of us in different spots.
We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade.
To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you.
I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.
And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.
It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.
Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.
I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that's so antithetical to where my career began and what I thought was possible. I want to believe we can do better, and ideals can still matter in software.
And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.
Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding.
I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (except maybe github actions, which seems to get 10x the attention it deserves); the challenge is I perceive far better solutions to be chosen which would serve the open source world if we simply deploy a slight increase in cognitive energy.
Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid.
Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.
For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.
It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.
If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.
I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.
I'm interested to see where you land the project at post-GH. The platform has just not grown in the ways I had hoped and their reliability has been a real issue for awhile now.
I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.
"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."
And I think that you and GitHub went through the stages of life together. They probably weren't exactly parallel, but I bet you measure and remember your life through GitHub's life to some degree, along with the projects you had there.
There's no question that with your drive and acumen that you could build the GitHub that you both had and want. It might be your next chapter.
I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life.
That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.
You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things.
> Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub
Yeah I agree. I'm not going to pick on someone for having an unhealthy relationship with a product such that they get weepy when it goes downhill. But I do hope he recognizes how unhealthy it is, and works to improve that.
It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.
> GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better
Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.
It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public.
GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.
I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.
I love the ideas and motivations underpinning Github's creation. For a long time Github was the best instantiation of those ideals. Maybe not so much anymore. Transitions are always the most difficult but they often result in new perspectives.
One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.
I don't have much of an opinion about Github, but I just want to add that your feelings are valid. It is not a stupid thing and I hope nobody is making fun of you for crying over it.
Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.
Do you think this is endemic to large software organizations today, or are our needs (and the corresponding complexity) just outstripping the ability of old business models to address it?
People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.
Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn't and ever since Microsoft took it over, it was just run into the ground.
I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.
The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.
I'm a bit lost about the problem. Is it really about crying about outages? I'm aware of enshittification issues in the broader tech field but the post and this comment don't really say what the problem is. If this is supposed to be some kind of signal and wakeup call, more info would help. For context I'm a lightweight Github user for over a decade, mostly putting up personal projects without much collab, and opening issues in other repos when I find bugs, just cloning and forking stuff (mainly in the machine learning community, but also in general Linux tools). For me it works okay enough, compared with the overall landscape of SaaS. I'm not a fan, don't feel any loyalty and my expectations for user abuse from big tech are admittedly pretty abysmal by now. I'm just not seeing what specifically happened with github to trigger this.
You mean being affected by the constant outages that make the product literally unusable? If you were doing any serious work with it you might understand.
Thanks, I thought there was some other kind of flareup recently. This seems like bog standard service provider stuff. When my Vodafone internet connection has a lot of outages, I switch to another ISP. Same here. No need to overdramatize it. Use GitLab or whatever else.
No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked.
I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.
Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', then there are 10 different competitors ready to take over, and I hope some of them do. Better for the ecosystem to have a strong element of competition. Perhaps their time as top dog is ending, and it's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.
So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan.
Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?
You mean the AI that might fail and suck every last ounce of entropy or life out the planet and sufficate it? Have you seen the insane amount of natural gas being burned to power it? Obviously I'd love if AI solved its own energy crisis but that hasn't even begun to happen yet. You think it will invent cold fusion? Room temp super conductors? Solar cells past our theoretical limits? Do you realize it's literally being controlled by human greed?
What about P vs. NP? Is auto-complete able to create P solutions and then perform NP verification by interacting with experiment or calculation IO? Couldn't it test solutions faster than a human on problems with massive solution spaces like folding proteins or aligning electron-hole pairs?
You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!)
This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:
You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.
More importantly, Mitchell, you care.
Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.
In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.
Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
People will comfort you about your emotions and your tears and then tell you you’re wrong to feel sad about it. They’re lying to you. Your instincts about how you feel are completely correct.
The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy.
I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.
Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.
It's not stupid to share your emotions towards a platform you've grown passionate of, especially when since Microsoft's acquisition, the platform has become enshittified, and now, vibe coded to an extent that there is not a single week where there are no issues with the platform.
Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D
Naw I did the same after I got "piled" on at Metafilter a few years back, and after 18-years buttoned my account because I was sick of the toxicity (I am an ancient BBS/usenet guy from decades ago - I can handle "flamewars"). I am pretty "left-leaning" liberal, but the "purity tests", insular nature and extreme "wokeness" that place has turned into has basically ruined it. They have monthly meta discussions/threads on why they are losing attention/participation, yet they don't seem to recognize that they drive people away.
Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")
No serious person would make fun of this emotional reaction. It seems technology had something going on, and it quickly got flooded by incompetence and greed.
We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology.
I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here.
Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.
There is absolutely nothing normal or healthy about being so attached to a source control repo that you cry when you replace it. I'm not saying OP is right about testosterone levels (how the hell would I know, I'm not a doctor), but everyone telling Mitchell "it's ok to feel things" is doing him a grave disservice. He has a very unhealthy attachment to Github and he needs to work on it, not have people validate his unhealthy behavior.
> it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
Yes it is and I didn't claim it wasn't, so this is a strawman.
There's nothing personally indicting about having low testosterone. It's relatively common and it's potentially a serious medical condition. There is no reason to take offense from this.
> I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor.
I don't see a reason to counter anything I said. I offered neutral information that may help the OP. If the OP's testosterone levels are indeed low due to a serious medical condition, then you've just done them a major disservice. Even if you're of the opinion that it's normal, it's reasonable for someone else to assess that feeling sadness to the degree of provoking tears in response to deciding not to use productivity software is a cause for concern.
The point I was making in my initial reply was in response to the trivialization of what someone else cares about ("sad enough to cry over productivity software"). That to me is by definition judgmental.
I don't believe there is a universal list of things that is OK to care deeply enough to cry about.
There are plenty of things you would cry about that I would not, but I can understand why you would care deeply about those things. Or maybe you are of the opinion that crying isn't allowed at all. Which is also an opinion.
My use of "judgmental" was to communicate that my intention was not to pass judgment on his worth as a person or his worthiness of respect as a person or professional in me providing honest feedback about his behavior.
> I don't believe there is a universal list of things that is OK to care deeply enough to cry about.
It's not about prescribing when it's OK to cry or trivializing what he's sad about, it's about deviations from average behavior. The vast majority of emotionally well-adjusted men usually only cry at the death of a loved one or during a divorce or serious break-up. Here's data on that: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51961-the-who-what-where-w... To find yourself crying in a situation different from those situations should raise a red flag. Yes it may be the case that it's not a sign of anything serious but given the rarity of the situation, it's reasonable to suspect there may be something else at play, e.g. low testosterone.
Tools can be frustrating. We can get emotional with tools we appreciate and we grew up with. But we should also learn to not focus solely on work efficiency. As you say yourself, this is unhealthy. You've labeled it, now work on fixing that unhealthy relationship with work, and with that tool.
Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day.
We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties.
Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc
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.
I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.
I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
The problem IMO is that they filled GitHub with Microsoft folks who just don't have the engineering self-sufficient hacker culture that is required to balance the "attraction park" vibe that GitHub paired it with. So now it's just an attraction park for Microsoft employees to go and do silly work with teams of 100 that should have been done by a skilled team of 5 hackers.
I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.
They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.
Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.
> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
What do you mean "we keep falling for it"? I remember after the acquisition there were tons of projects that left for Gitlab or other forges on principle of boycotting Microsoft. And for the many who stayed on Github, we still got about 6 years of pretty great free services before reliability really started to decline.
And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world.
I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.
This Disney brain of the Americans is what the problem is. It's not good guys and evil guys. It's money. Money and power have mechanisms. Pinky promises, benevolence etc. don't mean anything in capitalist business. It doesn't mean it has to be all thrown out the window. It can provide a service for a price, you can take it. Without being invested emotionally, without brand loyalty. That's dummy stuff. Businesses are not charities, and even charities are often quite businesslike. Unlearn naivety, read literature, human culture has known about the effects and incentives around money and power, petty and grand, for a long time.
Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right.
> It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit.
I'm not sure who "we" is in this story, but the _most_ optimistic of my peers pointed to typical MS projects of that scale having a little proper investment in interesting features and also taking at least a couple years to fail. HN sentiment wasn't positive either. The 99th percentile in favor of MS were fine with it, but the 90th percentile recognized the M&A for what it was, especially as specific features started showing their colours.
Lest this come across as a drive-by insult, I'm actually very curious who "we" is. Humanity is a very, very broad spectrum, and my intuition often doesn't appropriately capture the divers backgrounds of real people, despite spending large amounts of time with (usually from working alongside) deck-hands, captains, sanitation workers, bankers, pilots, jackhammer operators, semi drivers, farmers, programmers, mathematicians, and a host of other people. The gap I'm seeing is likely in my understanding (rather than, e.g., the post being mal-formed), so I'd like to correct that.
GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.
Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.
> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
Sorry, why the hell would any company do this? Goodwill is measured by MBA's in pennies and they paid *billions*.
This is like that time Google acquired the .dev domain "to reserve it for developers" but then ended up selling it- like everyone said they would.
You have got to be absurdly naive to believe that Microsoft does altruistic things, if there's no direct (or indirect) business they're not doing it: they are famously not a charity.
They have to be the richest men on the planet, retire, and then they'll do some charity.. perhaps because they feel guilty about what they did on an island or something.
This happens with almost every acquisition from Red Hat to WhatsApp.
If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.
> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
A lot of companies say that when they acquire another, and it might be true for a few years, it might even be the actual intention of the people involved in making the acquisition, but it usually doesn't last.
> It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
call me a skeptic, but can (and has) such a model existed in a capitalist system?
It has never existed. Everything a business does is for power and profit, including the times when they pretend they aren't doing things for power and profit.
This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.
> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.
It's called a vesting schedule. ;)
What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.
For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.
> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves
I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.
I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.
I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.
It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.
Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?
Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.
To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”
Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.
The process is necessary for both sides. Acquisition by large companies is the primary way that people get rewarded for building good things. If you take it away, there won't be many startups left - all new developments will come from the big companies that can afford them, and only the types of developments those companies' managers want to make.
It's only "necessary" if one accepts that the current way is the only way.
I'm not really sure what the point of encouraging new development is if the end result is "big company scoops it up and makes it shitty, but people get to enjoy it for a few brief moments before that happens."
That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.
In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.
Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.
I was referring to the case where the founders and investors sell the startup to larger company. Of course, if they don't sell, and the company stays founder-led, the outcome is often better. I didn't know Zoho never took (serious) VC money.
It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.
> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters
Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?
In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is.
If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.
Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
As someone who relies on it for all of my workflows at a normal job, core functionality issues result in me not being able to get work done on at least a weekly basis reliably at this point, and it's been that way for months.
The things aren't profile pictures not loading in saudi, they're botching merge jobs, git/api operations being down, pull requests not loading, etc. And that's on top of the plethora of UI bugs that have been pervasive for years that aren't blocking functionality.
Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in.
Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.
We don't have to let it be a utility service. It's not like the power and water to your house where laying new pipes is a monumental and stupid effort. $3 per month can get you a VPS to run your git hosting on - if you even need git hosting, and aren't just using GitHub because it's there.
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 :(.
Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.
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.
Not popular. Core. It was the trusted place for open source software. Then it was ads. Then the day they bundled there was a MASS exodus. And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
> And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!".
I mean, we got ~15 years of great service out of them for free. I used to pay for my own servers in colo for all the stuff Github has been providing for free all that time. It'll suck to move, but I've done it before. It's hard to turn down the loss leader they want to give me, when it's a really good product. Now that it's stopped being a really good product, maybe it becomes easier to turn down, I dunno.
Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
For whatever it's worth, which is probably not much, I'm in my late 40s and I never really liked sourceforge either. Too many clicks to do anything (still true), and I didn't like cvs (also still true, but thankfully now irrelevant).
(My SF account dates from June 2004. I expect I was thinking about using it as version control for a FOSS project I was working on at the time, though I don't know why, as it seems SF didn't support svn until 2005. Maybe I couldn't find any better options? The pre-GitHub ecosystem was pretty bad! But, luckily, I ended up not having time for any FOSS stuff from about autumn 2004, so: problem solved. And when I next looked, in early 2010, everything seemed to be git+github, and all the better for it.)
CVS was the best option when SourceForge began, and Subversion was barely an improvement. SourceForce was critical to the growth of Open Source and Free Software in the 00s. Projects no longer needed to maintain their own revision control server, file server, forum, issue tracker, etc. SF.net wasn't great compared to any of the current generation of hosting services. And, most Open Source projects were in an uncomfortable state of looking around for alternatives by the time Github arrived in 2008, because it was slow to adopt newer technologies and was running on a skeleton crew. Most of my projects had their own forums/issue trackers, and were self-hosting git, by then. Ads stopped being a usable revenue strategy, so SF.net stopped being able to keep up with what developers wanted.
But, it had a few years where every OSS developer I knew had nothing but positive feelings toward SourceForge. It gave one of the projects I work on thousands of dollars worth of transit over the years. It's hard for folks who've only ever worked on an "everything for small developers is a loss leader" internet to understand that we used to pay for and manage our own servers. I had a $200/month bill for just my Open Source projects on a couple of colocated servers.
Yes, SourceForge went through a lot of shitty stuff. The overtly hostile stuff (adware inserted in OSS projects) happened after it changed hands. But, when the revenue of their original model dried up and they couldn't stay on top of new development (being slow to offer a good git experience was a fatal mistake).
Anyway, it's not great now (though it is now owned by seemingly decent folks, who haven't really been able to find a way to make it work), and it went through a period where it was a borderline criminal enterprise, but it started out as a genuinely helpful part of the OSS community.
Not always. Before dice bought them they didn't do the ads. I even remember early on when you had to submit a project for approval before you got a CVS repo.
> SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements.
I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy.
Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge.
Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience.
Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.
A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don't load. Or PRs literally don't appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It's a daily occurrence to play the 'is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?' game.
Oh, and don't forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the 'new experience' and the 'legacy view'. You just can't trust it as much anymore.
Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can't ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.
All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional?
GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.
Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.
In our internal metrics you can see a clear increase in PRs and CI runs in general that tracks with agentic coding adoption, and it's significant, so I absolutely buy that GitHub would be struggling to take the brunt of that without big changes
A charitable view might be that changing which fingers you're using to plug the holes in the dike is a lot harder when the volume of water on the other side is increasing exponentially.
I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub
Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.
So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.
i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle.
It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios
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.
> 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.
I kept a Docker install of GitLab running for many years at my first full time employer out of university back in 2014 to 2020. It was really not too difficult. Every once a while they would release a major version that required a migration or config update, but mostly the updates were a docker compose pull and docker compose up away. At our single company scale with only some 25 developers max (don't remember exactly anymore) a self-hosted instance on a moderate VM was super stable and quite boring. And boring is often good. It might be that hosting GitLab for much bigger organizations is a different beast!
I remember that the first instance of their CI solution was a separate server/service that coordinated CI jobs on runners. That was a bit cumbersome. But then they integrated the CI coordination into the main server and you only needed to figure out the CI runner part.
Today I would likely have gone for Forgejo with runners for such a small company if I were to self-host. Less moving parts and smaller footprint.
Just moved our stuff from gitlab to forgejo. Gitlab is fine. Just too much stuff for a small org. And I hated the upgrades. And they kept adding things and none of those were what I wanted :) guess a different audience or something. very good to have some options though!
It can be run as a single docker container, so it's actually very easy to self host. Occasionally it'll get into a 500 conniption and needs a restart, but you can create a healthcheck for that.
I made the decision to leave Github a couple months ago when I retired and started heavily working on personal projects. I like the idea of radicle and used it for a while, but it's complicated to set up and maintain if you want to run your own seed node and pin your personal projects.
What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.
A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.
Exactly this. Even though I don't use git-bug anymore, I'm still a sponsor. I desperately want an issue-tracker-in-.git to become a standard.
Issues and CI are the only lock-in. The latter is legitimate because you're using someone else's CPU, but every developer has the tooling to "git diff" and write comments if we could just agree on a format.
They can clone the repo, make changes, and then push. On the server, you can have a hook that checks if the commit only contains appropriate issue changes, and apply just those.
Sure, a little more complicated than “Create Issue”, but not that much for devs. We could even simplify the workflow with e.g. git-issue or something like that, similar to e.g. git-send-email.
git issue init “There is a problem”
git issue push
git issue get 6 # short for issue@{6}
Radicle is such a cool concept and seems to be working great. The only thing it needs is a better way to search through the projects hosted on each node.
The centrality of GitHub was part of its appeal. It’s where you went to see where nearly every (obviously not all) open source project was being developed. Based on his post, the network effect was a large part of the draw and the reason he stayed despite reliability issues. A more federated set of git UIs will never capture the same feeling.
I could imagine something like the mastodon protocol but for git forges, where even though they are separate websites there would be no true boundary to discoverability/interaction
They're all just value propositions. Is it worth my time and money? There ya go that's it.
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
> I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
I think that model works well when it comes to code, but I don't think the non-free software movement ever really figured out how to deal with services and data. Even if GitHub was completely 100% GPL Free Software... the user accounts and everyone's comment history and stuff lives on a database somewhere. The servers are running somewhere. That's where the community is.
Even if you could take GitHub and spin up your own fork running the exact same software, the community isn't there. The interactions aren't there, the history isn't. It's like building a clone of your childhood house and wondering why your young parents don't magically appear in it.
You're completely right. I care about the free software movement from an ethical/freedom-preserving perspective, and I do think that many facets of the movement are too grounded in the details of how personal computer software in the 80s and 90s worked, rather than in the question of how to import the user-freedom-perserving ethos to services and data.
The question of how to create free-software-mediated online communities that don't involve storing user identity and data in a company's private database is critical. The user database, and what can be built upon it, is the single biggest reason people do use Github despite its flaws.
Is the problem solved by an open database license? Doesn't that make a community migration easier, putting a cap on how enshittified any given database can become?
I don't think the community of GitHub matters as much as people keep saying here. I think each project has its own small number of developers, and getting all of them to move is much easier. It has a larger number of bug reporters and downloaders, who only interact with the project occasionally and are perfectly capable of doing the same thing anywhere else.
> On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
Since we’re getting all philosophical, heartbreak isn’t inherently bad, it means you had the opportunity to love something deeply. Being engaged in the world means taking risks on things that might disappoint you. I do wish more of that love were directed at open source, but it’s not as if open source is without heartbreak and disappointment. Richard Stallman is sort of emblematic of someone who starts out with good intentions, but whose paranoid risk aversion probably put a ceiling on his potential?
I've never understood the enthusiastic sharecropping for Github. It's a reasonable tradeoff to let Github own the public home for your code, but no reason to be happy about it.
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.
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.
The old saying goes: Everyone only uses 10% of what MS Excel can do. But everyone uses a different 10%.
The same goes for Github to a degree. Yes, there are hot paths that "everyone" uses, but also areas where most people never wander and other use daily.
Google Docs doesn't do even 20% of what Office does, but it's a serious competitor anyway. That's because it implements a 5% feature that 80% of its customers use: instant internet sync.
At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.
I often daydream about what a magical "life scoreboard" would have on it, some universe-aware program counting arbitrary things. I'd love for such a scoreboard to display "percentage of Nike shoe owners that know Nike is the Greek goddess of victory."
I would guess under 10%, and only that high because Nike sells shoes in Greece and Italy.
It does a lot but at the end of the day, if the core functionality is just not good anymore, maybe put all the side projects on the actual side and focus on how to make sure core functionality suck less.
For example - We adopted GitHub Actions, then we swapped it out this year. Our own primary use case is code hosting + PRs. We want it to talk to the other (better) tools that intended for their use case. We want it in a secure yet fast and available manner. Nothing else. I don't care about projects, issues, or whatever super app they're trying to become.
I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
> I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges.
Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
I say this as someone who actually ran mailservers for about 25 years, who can telnet to port 25 and type SMTP to send an email, and who is hugely found of plaintext: I'd rather quit coding than move to that workflow. I loathe every bit of the pipeline of getting a clean patch from machine A to machine B, where I control at most one of them, and having it come out the other side with the same SHA256 digest. I don't look down on people who prefer it: to each their own! But I'll never in a million years understand it. Say what you will about the GitHub-style PR process, and there's plenty to say about it!, but there's a reason that devs outside LKML and the *BSD mailing lists pretty much immediately leapt onto GitHub the moment it became widely known. It was a revelation.
In this workflow, I don't think it's meant to have the same SHA1 digest. It's a workflow that's very much designed for a handful of core contributors (who have direct repository access) and gatekept one-off patches.
Some other accepted git workflows, like rebasing onto master, or even adding a "committed-by" or "signed-off-by", don't preserve SHA1 hashes either, and it seems you don't really need that property outside of closely collaborating cliques.
I get your point and maybe my tone was snarky (not a native speaker). But why would you want an exact reproduction on the other side? The diff format is human-readable for a reason, so slight errors can be fixed quite easily (if they do happen). Extracting patches from a well-configured MUA can be done quickly too.
Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.
Mailing patches is the same as squashing commits. The Linux kernel would be much harder to maintain without messy history being carefully distilled down to well crafted patches.
But mailing patches is a pain in the ass. VCSes should support squashing and rebasing.
yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that.
if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.
however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).
> managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?
The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.
He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.
> 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".
At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.).
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
Note that SourceForge is very different from Sourcehut. Sourcehut is a self‑hostable software forge that can be interacted with by email even without an account. I'd forgotten about GitLab. I guess it's annoying enough that I repressed it.
Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
I haven't made a comprehensive list, but off the top of my head:
- frequently needed navigation links buried within menus within other menus
- menus labeled by mysterious icons, sometimes with mysterious text, sometimes with no text at all
- authentication system that has failed me in a variety of ways over the years, even locking me out of an account in one case
- client-side script execution required to do anything all, even simply display a file
As I said, I haven't kept a list, but GitLab is very much in the category of interfaces that were built by javascript fanatics who don't understand (or don't care about) ergonomics or privacy. I accept that not everyone is bothered by its many problems, but I avoid it when I can.
Doh, I completely forgot about GitLab. OK so that's 3 services. I'm only counting hosted services that aim at serving all comers and providing an entire platform similar to GitHub. Individual disconnected instances, while useful, aren't a replacement for the social aspect of GitHub.
>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.
> 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.
It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.
I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.
I think it's more accurate to say that Wine contains some components that are emulators, not that it is an emulator. Sure, it has to emulate the x86 MMU's segmentation behavior, because Linux doesn't set it up the same way. It has to emulate x86 interrupt & CPU exception delivery, because Windows delivers those to applications in a different way than Linux does. For some very old programs, it has to emulate I/O ports and some device behavior. I think GDI and DirectDraw require emulation of a framebuffer and palette hardware.
But the vast majority of Wine's code is not emulation; most of it is a clean-room reimplementation of the win32 APIs, a PE/COFF loader, Windows registry, etc. All of those parts are implementations of API contracts and binary format parsers, not emulation, in the same way that GNUstep is a reimplementation of NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, and not an emulator. (The main difference being that Wine can run Windows executables unmodified, whereas GNUstep expects you to recompile/relink from source. That is a sizeable difference, but not an emulator-sized difference.)
And yes, the computer science definition of "emulator" doesn't specify hardware: it's simply a system that reproduces the externally observable behavior of another system. But if we follow that definition too closely, then things that are clearly not emulators become emulators. Like musl and glibc are emulators of the C standard library (or of each other?), Android is an emulator of the Java virtual machine, and Mesa's software renderer is an emulator of OpenGL or a GPU (that latter bit is tempting, but it really isn't a GPU emulator). At this level, "emulator" just means "abstraction layer", which makes it pretty useless as a term if we take it that far.
So I think "WINE Is Not an Emulator" is true. It contains some bits that are absolutely emulators, but it is not, in its entirety, an emulator, and emulating isn't the function of the bulk of its code.
(I'm not trying to be pedantic here; this was actually a fun thought exercise about emulation in general and Wine in particular.)
> 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.
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.
Yes, but this time there’s the additional driving force of countries trying to become more self reliant and not get locked into US software giants (France and Germany for example). A long way to go, but it’s gaining more traction than the past half-assed attempts.
FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.
Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.
As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.
It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.
They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.
Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.
Last years Crowdstrike outage never hit any of the macOS computers with CS installed because on macOS the Crowdstrike agent runs entirely in userspace thanks to the Endpoint Security framework.
Really the security of macOS is probably the best of all of the desktop OSes, and as annoying as it can be.
People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.
And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.
I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.
> you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids
You think? They're still pushing the "native" Minecraft that isn't scriptable aren't they? And maintaining the fully moddable java MC against their will.
I know there is a complicated history here as well but I personally find VS Code pretty satisfactory for my needs and really appreciate that it's free.
Not sure if that balances out the burning fire of hate I feel for Microsoft Office but it's something.
Nope. I think all this is mostly virtue signaling and a bit of "GitHub derangement syndrome" in the water.
People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.
MH had a weird ass set of Tweets a month or so ago talking about GitHub needing disruption and how the UI was bad. Now it's "Not fun anymore".
I guess you die a hero or live long enough to be irrelevant and shouting at clouds like Stallman.
Work at a company on GH Enterprise. Outside those recent major incidents and a few spots here and there we haven't even noticed issues. It NEVER comes up on engineering or leadership meetings as an issue or risk. Not a single time has GitHubs issues come up as an agenda item. Yeah, YMMV but still...
> People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.
The writer of this blog post is Mitchell Hashimoto, and he has posted positively about AI, so that doesn't track at all.
The reason people are talking about it is because the decline is rapid. That's worse than the raw downtime. There's a sense that it will be even worse in a year.
I'm not a fan of AI everywhere but I have 0 reason to think this is from AI usage at Microsoft. Still, we talk about the issues a lot. We used to do our project management in GitHub. For whatever reason, projects don't work anymore. You can add an issue to a project and it won't show up. So we moved that part off of GitHub. That's too bad, I liked linking to issues.
If this happens enough, the only thing left will be hosting code, and we'll look at each other and go "we can do this anywhere"
> To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.
A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.
Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
git-bug is great but it doesn't handle PRs nor does it have a method for users without commit rights to submit bugs to the project. I know they're working on the latter (something with the web UI?) but until then you still need some kind of public infra for issue management if you want the general public to be able to submit issues.
I use it for my project[0] to keep issues centralized with the repo, but I still use Github Discussions as a pseudo-bug tracker to let random users provide input. If it's a bug I add it to git-bug and sync it to Github issues for public viewing[1], but if you want use bug reports that's not really going to work.
[1] Ironically I got this workflow idea from ghostty and mise, both of which require users to submit bug reports as discussions first and only generate tagged issues once an actionable bug is determined.
For me the main issue with git-bug is that they are not dogfooding it. However, it's also one of the few projects that is actually trying to solve the core problem, rather than skirting around it. (well I now learned of radicle in this thread and they seem to store issues in git and even have PR support I think)
> For me the main issue with git-bug is that they are not dogfooding it.
This is incorrect.
$ git remote get-url origin
ssh://git@github.com/git-bug/git-bug.git
$ for n in bugs identities; do echo "${n} on the remote: " $(git ls-remote origin "refs/${n}/\*" | wc -l); done
bugs on the remote: 453
identities on the remote: 311
That said, yes, GitHub is still our source of truth, as our web application does not currently support "guest" access, and there are other platform features that our community uses that we do not currently have support for (e.g. discussions and pull requests). Big changes to the web ui are coming soon, which will help to unlock the ability to do these things.
I've also been in talks with the Radicle team about possible collaboration.
Oh cool! I've come across git-bug a while ago, glad to see you're using it.
I didn't know git-bug doesn't support PRs yet. I think pull requests should be modeled as a kind of issue. It's an issue with some metadata that points to a commit (and besides the usual issue operations like add new comment or edit a comment, you also have the operation of editing the commit associated with the PR)
If git-bug gains suppport for Github discussions, it should also be able to import discussions from other places like a discourse forum. I think it would be kinda neat for projects that want to be self contained
> I've also been in talks with the Radicle team about possible collaboration.
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.
The most important part of Linus' project was day -1, when he sliced off all the chunks of work that depend on solving open research problems.
You don't want to start your Saturday morning declaring an _action struct, then filling the rest of the day staring at research papers about the current state of fast homomorphic encryption.
Does it have bidirectional tracking with Github? (if I create or comment on an issue in Github it will be reflected on epiq, and if I create on epiq, some bot will post it to Github). For me this is the key feature.
Also
> The system is designed to assure robustness and uses a number of techniques and design patterns to avoid merge conflicts.
Hey! Creator of Epiq here. Epiq is platform agnostic mening that it is doing its own thing and does not connect to github issues. Epiq maintains its own board definition as an immutable (append only) event log, which is synchronized using git.
An integration layer with github issues or other platforms is definitely not unthinkable.
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).
It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo.
Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.
Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)
It's definitely time to turn these loose web features into a real program. I don't understand the desire to clone github as a website. It's demonstrably 10,000x more work to maintain github.com than a "github" command.
We've had trouble with git and repo's that have used non standard refs. It's all fine and fancy until we wanted to use some tooling that works with git, except it wouldn't see our unusual refs, and because they were non standard they were effectively hidden unless you knew they were there. So the migration work (almost) silently lost 10+ years of old work that was hiding away under those non standard refs.
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.
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.
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).
Funny how windows updates are never postponed for lack of "scaling". I know, I know, completely different stuff here - but arent test vms and ci vms being updated constantly?
Im old enough to remember the hotmail migration to win2k (then 2k3) and the postmortem. I was also old enough to look at the rotor source code. Yah, that one, running managed code in freebsd.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
#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.
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.
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.
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).
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/
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.
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.
Interestingly ATProto uses Merkle Search Trees to store data as commits, so in some respects it is similar to git. It even signs each commit (say you post an issue record to your ATProto personal data server) it is inserted into your merkle search tree based on content and id hashing rules, and then the new root node in the tree is signed so you can verify its integrity.
Now there is absolutely a benefit to co-locating issues and PRs with your code in the same git repo. In a way it becomes much simpler to move your entire repository and all activity when everything is in the same .git folder.
With Tangled your code is stored in your code repository and issues and PRs in your data repository. On the other hand the ATProto stuff is what means your project becomes discoverable and that other users in the network automatically can interact with your repository (likes, issues, etc).
> 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.
The arrogance of anybody, let alone a designer, thinking they could build something better than the foundations of software (and the modern world itself) is crazy.
I love it, but you have to deliver or else I will mock you :P
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.
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.
I’m Maggie and I’m a staff research engineer at GitHub Next. At least that’s my title, but I’m actually a designer. Or I was, back when that was still a separate thing to engineering.
Ah. I didn't think we could debase the title of "engineer" any further, and yet here we are.
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?
The state of HN truly has fallen if people are questioning Maggie Appleton's credentials. Besides, she's working on GitHub Next, not the core product. Sheesh.
I'm aware of who this person is, been following their work since their egghead.io doodle days. What I would never do is put this person in a position involving software research when they were never professionally a software developer nor were they academically trained like one either.
I'm sorry but this is just a perfect encapsulation of why American corporations are brazenly bad and corrupt without actual competition.
This is honestly no different than RFK Jr being the Secretary of HHS. I'm sure if you spoke with him, he'd say he was highly competent at this job too.
Idk. If I learned that the head of design for Github worked as a linux contributor and C developer before taking on that role I would have a similar reaction.
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.
GitLab? We use gitlab for work. Its way worse in comparison.
Last week I encountered a bug where my merge request simply didn't show that I deleted a file. Apparently it's because my MR included the creation of a folder with the same name as the basename of the deleted file. Unacceptable for a code hosting platform.
Other than that I miss GH Actions, a clear ui (gitlab has way too many sub-menus), a responsive ui (gitlab feels very sluggish). And while we don't have the Gitlab duo activated, it still pops out regularly eventhough I can't use it besides closing it.
...and I don't even want to start with their issue buard.
It strongly reminds me of Jira in terms of quality, which is no compliment.
Would love to see it become more common for projects with sufficient inertia to host their own forge like GNOME or Inkscape do. Could be a service that foundations like CNCF or LF offer to their projects.
I haven’t really found that free services scale the same way. It’s hard for the “open source community” to contribute and improve the quality of bottlenecks that are only encountered by one operator.
When you take OSS projects that scale well, say Linux, Postgres, Kafka, redis, etc. they either scale up (Linux) which is arguable easier, or were able to scale out because there are thousands, if not millions, that have massive deployments pushing them to their limits.
Unless there is some sort of secure way to “open source” operational data for codeberg, or many others running huge deployments of Forgejo I don’t see it being very effective.
I do see Google having another go at code hosting though.
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.
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.
I'm also closely following Tangled's development. Their two biggest weak points: lack of private repositories and ux design (which I don't have a problem with but I've seen many people mention) are both being worked on. Atproto is developing a permissioned data segment to the protocol, and Tangled just hired a designer. I'm excited for it.
>manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute
For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.
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.
This seems like a great opportunity for new platforms who are rethinking the OSS space to finally gain the traction they need to be effective. For a collaborative platform, quantity is key, and I am hopeful that someone who is interested in advancing the software space will become the new go-to. This isn't to say that GitHub hasn't been innovating, but at least from my perspective, the way we've used git for the past however-many-years has remained basically constant.
Some projects that seem interesting:
- https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point)
- Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
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.
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.
Thanks for the callout: we’ve been reimagining code forges by making them irrelevant with tools and tiny services like: https://pgit.pico.sh (static site generator for git) and https://pr.pico.sh (pastebin for git collab)
They are still a WIP but it’s on our roadmap to continue to improve.
I’d love see Tangled succeed because it strikes a good balance of UX and features. Sadly, there’s no clear pricing story around managed solution. They are also VC funded so they can follow the “journey of VC backed org” anytime.
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 :))
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.
I find the alternatives more likely to ban/censor than X. Bluesky is definitely not civil to those with the "wrong" opinions, despite what proponents of the service say.
It's not about the technology, it's about the people. The initial people on your network matter. The moderators matter too. That's just a very different job than writing and shipping code.
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).
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.
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?
Lots of the users are bad, but the owner specifically tweaks and changes the algorithm to suit his own agenda and push his stance. That's what makes it an unserious platform.
> And also, there's some alternate microblogging site that is less hostile to truth and civility? Which site is that?
Mastodon, by definition. Any hostile instance can be left for a better one.
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!
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.
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.
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.)
I had steered away for a long while thinking it was subpar to GitHub, but it's really come a long way. Especially running it on a local network it's noticeably faster in every way than GitHub, and I'm able to build complex gitlab workflows with custom runners that are fully configurable and have effectively 100% uptime and no queues.
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.
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)
Eh, it wasn't about the stack, it was the features over quality track they were taking for a few years there where what features they had were impressive (they really motivated GitHub to get off its butt and do some things) but there were plenty of experience and reliability problems.
i am opposed to using anything which is not single binary and not using a sqlite db for self hosted things which don't need to scale to millions of users.
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!
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
Founder of WarpBuild here: we provide faster runners (also cheaper), and have some niceties around debugging workflows like ssh-ing into them, observability etc.
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...
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.
AI should not even be part of this discussion, it’s frankly irrelevant. None of the complaints Mitchell or anyone else has would be fixed by deleting Copilot or adding new agentic features. Deliver a stable and secure development platform first, then do AI stuff.
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
It was four years ago that GitHub had major enough outages with their database that they had to issue a press release (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...). Five months ago I was actually still recommending GitHub. Then a month ago I left the platform, because I couldn't get shit done anymore.
The alternatives aren't great. If any VCs wanna send a couple hundred grand my way, I'd be willing to start a GitHub alternative, if only so I could have a not-crappy place to host my own repos.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
As long as GitHub Actions is free for Open Source, I'll keep using it. There's nothing comparable for free yet.
Of course Github using now Azure as a testbed is problematic. Since Azure is mismanaged and doomed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 the problem will either be fixed or we all have to leave. I think they hired cheap staff to manually fix overprovisioned Azure boxes on demand. Maybe the morons at Azure will come to their senses one day, or not.
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 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’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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
> 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)
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
<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>
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.
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.
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.
Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.
It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)
My version of your post reads differently:
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.
I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.
In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.
I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
> "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.
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".
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
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.
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.
Vote with your wallet, or, if you're not paying anything, your feet.
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.
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).
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.
I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you
For businesses, staying signals their KPIs that everything is great and there's no need for change.
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.
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".
For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.
Yes, sure! OP didn't say that there aren't alternatives or that the alternatives aren't any good, they just said that GitHub is so huge it will probably continue to remain relevant, no matter how bad it gets. And they have a point - X is one example, but even SourceForge (remember SourceForge?) is still around, despite being an undeniably shitty platform that tried to install adware on their user's computers.
But OP did say the alternatives were “so much more complicated”. If you showed a new dev both GitHub and Forgejo, I’m not sure they’d notice the differences other than the latter being much faster for many common operations. It and Codeberg aren’t more complicated in any tangible way.
If GitHub’s internal thinking were “well at least we’re easier than Codeberg”, then they may find that the moat isn’t nearly so deep as they might hope.
Ah yes. Just like how Blockbuster Video remained relevant and everyone still uses it today.
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.
I may have my timelines wrong but I don't remember github being rock solid 5 years ago. I remember multiple outages keeping us from pulling code for go packages that were not using an enterprise dependency cache and killing multiple days of work a year for those systems. It's what I used as a forcing function to move people TO an enterprise dependency cache, and to find the few scofflaws running work code off of github.com versus enterprise.
You're right. I was misremembering this graph:
https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
Actually to me the answer is Ms made them get more accurate in their graph. It was definitely not Rick solid in 2015-2018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452011
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/31/github-goes-down-and-takes...
Another line on that graph should probably be "January 7, 2019: GitHub offers unlimited free private repos". I can't imagine that helps with service stability.
That is a pretty wild graph
There is no way Github had 100% uptime prior to the MS acquisition. Nobody has 100% uptime 100% of the time. They must have changed how they were measuring uptime.
Can you explain more of what you mean by "wild" here?
I never worked on any SaaS that had such high uptime. It seems pretty good to me. In 10 years, it was always better than 99.5% uptime. That seems impressive to me for a huge, complex SaaS like GitHub.
I might be wrong, but isn't half a percent almost 2 days of downtime in a year?
Or 7 minutes a day.
Feels like a pretty wildly misleading graph. What do they say about lies, damned lies and statistics?
This graph is literally designed to abuse correlation =/= causation by attaching the arbitrary label "microsoft acquires github" so that the reader will apply causation to the uptime.
Now let's overlay ontop of the uptime graph a few lines of: # of monthly active users, # of monthly commits, size of PRs, action minutes per PR (whatever demonstrates scaling)
Something tells me that the uptime issues follow scale more than they do ownership... but that's not the narrative that this chart was designed for...
The nice thing about statistics and math is that you don't need to stop at a feeling. If doubt their math, do it yourself.
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).
More AI it is
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.
> 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".
This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.
GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.
I joined a startup 3 years ago as employe 6. everyone was using windows but I was used to working with macos so I got a mac.
Took a year till everyone was using a Mac.
Most places I've worked I've had the autonomy to re-install my machine to whatever OS I worked with, so was always Debian Linux.
Then I joined some mega-corp, with it's structures and set systems, so opted for a Macbook.
Worst mistake of my life, OSX is horrid, I'd rather use Windows.
Lack of knowledge about something can certainly make it seem horrid. It just means you have a lot to learn. There is a reason so many of us engineers with decades of experience in Windows, MacOS (and OSX), and Linux use a Macbook Pro as our daily driver.
That is a really really shitty comment. Because their choice is different to yours they have a lack of knowledge?
FYI I had a top class developer working for me about 5 years ago, who saw me using WSL and VScode... they had a Windows machine and several macs due to the nature if their work. A week later they were on Windows every day, only using apple for apple builds.
The answer is, we don't all do the same kind of work. There is a reason so many engineers working in your field use mac. Guessing you are a Web developer?
It's funny you say this because the more I learned about mac the more I understood its limitations in being as good an operating system as e.g. Arch.
I know a lot of engineers. Some daily osx, some daily Linux. I'm not seeing any particular correlation in knowledge or skill - except perhaps slightly in the osx people's disfavor.
Maybe you can install homebrew and open source apps to make it more Linux like, but you'll still be stuck with Mac OS's shonky window and task management UI unfortunately.
Install SizeUp. I paid $10 10 years ago and have been using it ever since. Far better window management than any Linux distro I've used. (and better than windows but that's not saying much)
edit: 13 years ago
I like Divvy because it supports more than just halves and quarters — I use a 7×6 grid so my browser can be wider than my editor and terminal: https://mizage.com/divvy/
Pairs well with Stay to make windows automatically return to their assigned layout when plugging/unplugging my external display: https://cordlessdog.com/stay/
I found that part ironic and tone deaf as well. Like, read the room buddy. France just announced they're officially moving from Windows to Linux. The country of France. I think OP is looking for a single lynchpin moment where things change from one way to the other. Where in reality, things rarely happen that way. It's a slow and steady shifting away from one thing towards another.
I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.
What do you find awful about 1Password today?
So much to list:
- They ditched their previous android app for a new one that doesn't get the grandfathered accessibility access so autofill is mostly useless...
- On mac, safari integration is consistently flaky. It regularly keeps getting blocked in a loop telling me to unlock 1password when 1password has already been unlocked.
- Passkeys are unreliable to the point of being unusable
- Autofill frequently doesn't work well where for some reason the site with the same url as saved in 1password is not offered during autofill. When 1password used to work, it helped catch phishing attempts because it wouldn't show autofill on pages that do not match. Nowadays because of the shitty autofill, people get trained to go to the app, copy the password and paste it in the website. This means that it will no longer protect from phishing attempts
- The previous behaviour of saving any newly generated password as a password object (not login) was much better. Now newly generated passwords are only available in the password history of the browser extension you specifically used.
- I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website
At this point, the only reason I'm not using bitwarden is that search is very slow on it with 2k+ passwords.
When I quit using 1Password, it was when they dumped native apps for electron apps and quit supporting the product I’d been buying upgrades for every couple years, in order to pivot to a cloud model that lets them imposing an enterprise subscription model for enterprise users onto individuals. Dunno what they’re up to these days, but I’d be shocked if they could last six months without enterprise customers, so I know I’m not relevant to them anymore. And that’s the same way I view GitHub — individuals are financially and strategically irrelevant to their bottom line.
It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.
Just to add a dissenting voice to all the complainers:
- autofill on desktop is rock-solid, it virtually never fails, much less so than any other password manager autofill
- it works great with passkeys, again rock-solid, and again the best UX of any password manager. passkeys itself are also great
- OTP code integration (only use this for non-important stuff) works great too, again best-in-class
- switch to Electron was great for most, the Windows app sucked and there was nothing on Linux, now we have a good application across all 3 desktop platforms, although it was a slight downgrade for Mac users
- autofill works fine on Android 99% of the time
- 1Password CLI and SSH agent are interesting additions but SSH has a lot of paper cuts
In general, they have by far the nicest UX and UI of all password managers. And they really seem to care. They were the first to introduce stuff like "no automatic autofill" because of security implications, their vault spec is open source (in case they go belly up), they get audited regularly. They were the first to add passkeys and actually made a site (name escapes me) that shows which services have passkeys and how to activate them.
I can't globally disable that "autofill" also hits "submit". I want to review what it autofills before I submit. I consider this a security risk. I can disable submit only on a login-by-login basis, and my coworkers are able to reenable it again. I can't globally disable it for myself.
This setting does exist for "Universal Autofill" [1] which is what I use instead of any browser extensions because I don't want to get phished when I'm not at my best. [2] [3]
On the Mac app, the setting is at the bottom of the General settings screen.
The downside to forgoing the browser extensions is that creating new logins is painfully manual. The risks of using the extensions just freak me out too much.
[1]: https://support.1password.com/mac-universal-autofill/
[2]: https://hudlow.org/2026/practical-antiforgery#two-steps-forw...
[3]: https://hudlow.org/2026/practical-antiforgery/demo/1password
Painfully manual. Every time I have to delete the word "Login" when creating new login, I wonder how hard could it be to vibecode myself what I want. I fantasize about getting a job there to fix the UX issues and then quit.
I'm just using Bitwarden instead. My work still uses 1password for now, but we're in the process of moving to Bitwarden.
It much buggier for me since the enterprise/electron push.
Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.
FYI I recently discovered a 1p browser extension feature named “Password Generator History”. It has a record of all generated passwords, whether their respective items ever ended up saved or not. Live saver.
https://support.1password.com/recover-unsaved-password/
That is the feature that is complete broken for years on my laptop
Same here. I paid for my family's accounts for many years until the app suddenly became much worse. Honestly, Apple's own Passwords app has 95% of the features of, and the ones it does have work far better than the 1P equivalent. I can't imagine paying for a personal account again.
It’s getting buggier and buggier, not being able to fill in passwords properly is kind of a glaring omission of a password manager (and that’s on three different computers). They keep adding features but seem to show little interest in fixing bugs. I submitted debug logs, recorded videos etc but it just trickled out in the sand. And as another poster wrote, it all started going bad with the switch to Electron (might be the rust backend that is the problem, I don’t know and frankly don’t care, it just doesn’t work as well as it did before).
People still use 1Password? There are such better alternatives. Why would you subject your self to that awful ux?
The only password manager that IT allows on their hardware, bought by your employer.
I still use 1Password 6 to access my former stuff!
Not the parent, but the only thing I really hate about 1Password is that I can't tell it to never offer to save a specific site's password. I can turn off all offers to save passwords, or I can have the stupid pop-up ask me multiple times a day if I want to save that password. The pop-up chases me across the site until I get rid of it. Aarrgh. Blood boiling. Rage overflowing.
Other than that it's fine, I guess.
I have the same issue when using Google Passwords. One specific example: Many of my bank websites require 2FA with a code via email, SMS, or token. Each time, Google Chrome asks me if I want to update the password with the 2FA token. I have no idea how to disable it. Am I doing something wrong?
I have the same complaint about lastpass. With lastpass it's doable, but I have to keep looking up how to configure a site to never site and never ask.
Speaking of a "year of Linux on desktop", it's mostly not happening because the desktop lock-in has largely eased. I of course love my Linux desktop, but I use relatively few native applications, and every one of them is multiplatform now. Windows desktop becomes less and less relevant in its own way, by degradation of experience, and by being replaced with consoles and the Steam Deck.
Same may happen to GitHub. CI/CD tools and workflows can become more portable and adaptable. Independent code review tools that can use GitHub API along with a few other APIs may become popular. GitHub will become one of, not the one. I won't call it a bad outcome.
I think the same of AWS. There are alternatives out there, especially for small personal projects.
I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container.
I still have battle scars from trying to set up AWS Fargate. It's just a hodge podge of corporately requested features at this point.
Honestly many companies would do well to use these services. I think we get too much into the idea our apps need the same guarantees as the large products out there. Define your SLAs and then choose the platform.
Whats funny is that nearly every major desktop app and feature has come out on macOS first and windows has nearly always been an after thought
Starting when?
Windows 1.0, I believe. Xerox PARC invented the WIMP UI paradigm (windows, icons, menus, pointer), Apple commercialised it first, and then Microsoft copied Apple.
GitHub lost me when Microsoft used my shitty code to train shitty AI without my permission.
Wym? They had a banner up for months asking if you wanted to opt out.
How do I opt out if somebody pushes a copy of my project's repo to their own namespace on GitHub?
Who's this random somebody that has a copy of your code that you don't want shared or trained on? GitHub's no saint here, but it seems like that somebody is an issue, not GitHub.
Until now there was never a reason to have a permissive software license that tries to restrict where the recipients can store the code, because this is a new issue. My software is AGPLv3 but I'd rather just stop sharing my code entirely than let these corpos profit from my work for free. Mirroring onto GitHub is very very common since GitHub is frequently accessible in network environments where random others forges may not be.
It is actuly good for the ecosystem to have competition. Githubs quasi monopoly was a bad thing. And will continue to be a bad thing in the future if it remains
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
None of the alternatives you cited are as complicated as GitHub. Also, GitHub started with this Actions bullshit which is just reinventing the CI wheel and overcomplicating stuff that was already made simple. The one thing I hate Forgejo about is for being compatible with Actions and promoting is as the way to go for CI, when you have much better alternatives like Woodpecker, where you can actually understand the underlying code for your CI/CD pipelines.
The problem is that from the outside it seems like Microsoft no longer cares about the product. So much so that "the product" has become "shareholders"[0].
We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.
We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.
In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...
I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.
Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn't even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.
An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There's just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
"Maybe"? You actively enable that corruption and advocate for turning a blind eye to it and the consequences.
Those "overemployed" people are your bosses, indeed unable to keep up, steering you into the situation of "those people at Palantir".
When things spiral downward, telling yourself how you're "relatively fine still" with blinders on short-term, "works" just up to hitting solid ground.
Believe it or not, some companies are run by people who just want to sell widgets and get on with life. Some of them even have morals! Shocking, I know. Smaller companies, sure, but they'll still pay you a good living wage anywhere but SV. Not every boss is a megalomaniac.
I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
Protec ya Neck but what's the other one?
I assume they meant C.R.E.A.M. :p
and probably Once In A Lifetime
I would argue it goes even a step further: any org the size of Microsoft struggles to maintain the quality of... well, anything. And, added to that, Microsoft seems exceptionally bad at doing fucking anything now. Azure is a complete mess, Windows is an utter dumpster fire, the office suite feels like it gets just slightly worse with every update, Copilot is a fucking joke compared to every other AI on offer (and hilariously, will agree with everything I've said here!), they won't even use their own frameworks to develop software anymore!
Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.
They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.
This issue of large organizations making shitty products seems to infect every company except for a handful. Even Google, with all its good intensions, by 2010 was full of political animals climbing ever higher on the corporate ladder while management struggled to set incentives correctly to make the company product focused.
Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.
Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).
Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.
It does not deserve to get better.
It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.
Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]
GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.
You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.
It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
Did Heroku ever actively degrade? Seems more like it was neglected until the competition eclipsed it entirely. What GitHub is doing seems worse, like true active regression.
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.
GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.
Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example:
- The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself.
- The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did not need to happen. Its badness has nothing to do with how many users use it. It’s just bad in a no-scaling-involved way.
- GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards."
No, it did not have to expand into the AI field. A competent AI-free GitHub Core that could have an optional AI layer on top would have worked just fine if not dramatically better than the current mess.
(I say this as a paying user who will probably cancel soon. The Copilot reviews are kind of nice, but they’re not any better than a third-party system, and I’m getting sick of GitHub not working. Plus, the repos I’ve already migrated off of GitHub get to have nice non-AI things like gasp service accounts.)
I knew a guy who worked on it tell me actions is just literally a fork from Azure Devops. Which is why it never really fit into GitHub.
I have heard this also. I still find it wild that Azure DevOps had that feature long before GitHub
> GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better
There might not have been a predecessor, but it's been obvious for at least a decade that GHA are a very poorly designed programming language, yet nothing was done to improve. They introduced Github Apps that solve many of the issues with Actions, but that requires deploying a service and aren't anywhere near the ease of use of Actions.
Isn't it a dumbed down version of Azure Pipelines?
It depends on whether its authors were aware of Azure Pipelines and used them as a source of inspiration. Perhaps.
Amusing new observation due to today’s outage [0]: apparently GitHub never bothered to do the obvious optimization to the /pulls page: when you load it with the default “is:pr is:open”, they seem to be depending on their heavyweight search service, despite the fact that their normal API can enumerate open PRs just fine (and probably at dramatically lower cost to them). Sometimes the common case of a webpage should be simple instead of a relying on something fancy.
[0] Which has been ongoing for hours but hadn’t started when I wrote my comment. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/x69zbgdyfzg0
> It’s grown in a way that degraded it
Im an outsider and a layman, so this might be totally off base, but...
The way I hear people talking about github reliability doesnt sound like scaling problems to me. If you drive 20 miles every day but then decide to drive 2000 miles and run out of gas, thats a problem of scale. If you drive 2000 miles and your engine explodes, thats a problem of design.
Maybe their design problems are being made evident because of sudden scale, but they're still design problems.
I think the fair side of this is that you have to make tradeoffs when you design things. Scaling problems are design problems, but whether they were mistakes or not really depends on how predictable that scaling was.
Car analogies are typical, so I'll add in there.
My car can take the four of us, and we can load it up with things from the shops. I can put a bunch of heavy tins of food in there, or some DIY things, but if I put several tons of stones in the boot it'll totally fuck it up.
Is that a design problem?
Not really, it's a relatively cheap regular car, and it failed at a certain scale.
It would be a design problem if it were a flatbed truck, despite it being the same scaling that showed the problem.
Making my car resilient enough to take that weight would require tradeoffs that would either make it worse for other jobs I want it to do or at least add significantly to the cost.
This is similar in engineering software systems too, you can make it handle scaling up better, but this can require a much more complex architecture that may make it slower at smaller scales. It can make it more complicated to work with, add additional risks of failure as well.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field
Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't.
I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.
> What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be.
Yes, and what Github wants public github.com to be is free QA for Github Enterprise. My company is a paying customer with 200 engineers and it's pretty clear we're just Guinea pigs for the Enterprise product.
Thanks for your perspective, appreciate it!
> central role
Isn't this the massive problem? You're trying to do everything, and you can't, and you're trying to do it for everyone all at once, and have tied it all together so much that scaling up gets worse. If it's more than twice as hard to cope with twice the use, then you have to charge a bunch more to customers as you grow - and that's for your customers to get no actual benefit.
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster.
The experience has degraded. It's really, really bad. I've seen companies spending thousands and thousands of dollars weekly in developer time *hitting rerun on broken actions*. It's so expensive to start with then so expensive in how awful it is to use.
Something I really don't get I guess is what out of all of this actually needs to be cross-project. How much of my github use needs access to something that isn't running on the same machine? I worked with a team building things actively, maybe 20 devs? That's not really a large set of users. Let's say 10 devs with the workload of 20, the cheapest plan would be $40/mo, enterprise would be ~$200. Would ten heavy users really max out a 64GB ram, 6+8 core new i5 with dual nvme drives, a gigabit connection and unlimited traffic? That's about $40 at hetzner for a box.
I'm not arguing a big federated position, I just don't really get why some of these enormous companies need to be so centralised. It feels like the problem is trying to be a big interlinked thing, and failing at it. The only things I can think of are
1. Links between issues
2. Accounts
3. Search
The first is mostly solved with literally just links, accounts isn't a huge problem and search is fair enough - but search is utterly awful and I cannot find things within one single repo or organisation reliably. So global stuff is irrelevant.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up
If github persists in being utterly shit for developers, it won't be around to find out. I'm not sure at all what part of the AI stuff needs to make everything else bad, and I'm extremely bullish on AI and agentic coding.
To really hammer this last point home, as agentic coding means we can do a lot more and faster - the unreliability of github has become much more apparent and impactful. Unreliable tests, unreliable code pulling and pushing, unreliable diffs. You're making the agents jobs harder, making the devs jobs harder exactly in the place they now spend much more time.
It makes github dramatically more expensive as a place to work. Also just really fucking annoying.
The federation thing isn't just github of course.
I think the general answer is that it would take real development effort to make federation work, and having to have compatibilty with other installations slows down your own pace of possible features -- I think these things are undeniable. Arguably worth it for society/the community (I wish we had more open standard federation and less centralization), but from the point of view of the company will it actually lead to increased profits sufficient to justify? In fact, it may do the opposite, if you are one of the largest, then lock-in is better for your profitability. Compatibility with other services is only important for the small upstarts trying to get customers from the largest.
I don't like it, but I think we will get proprietary centralization as long as we have capitalism of the sort we have.
I get what you mean, I think what I'm pretty stuck on is what is the centralisation solving? Federated messages dealing with lots of things flowing back and forth and live updates, etc is one thing - but what is it about GH that makes much of a difference when things are in one place or many? Much of the work is done in very isolated sections.
Imagine each organisation/user was run with completely isolated data, and you used something like google sign in for auth (so one global sign in, then oauth).
What wouldn't work? Global search, that I get. I struggle to think of other things though. Maybe whether links between issues across orgs updates? Every commit, diff, code browser, permissions for writing, reading, org level search, stars, would work with zero federated sort of search-y things. Package management, issue tracking, all that would be the same.
Forks followed by PRs? Not sure that would be much different - maybe you'd have to raise an issue on the original project with a link to your new repo & branch.
Hm, thinking about it.
Some of my attraction to github is just that I am used to and like the UI, and I get annoyed on another platform where I don't understand the UI and don't know where to find things or how to do things (like set up free CI for open source project, or debug existing CI for a PR).
Other than that... auto-linking to issues, prs, and code (with auto-expansion of excerpt in issue) cross-project is nice?
But you are right, git is theoretically something where separate projects are fairly isolated, which does make it more mysterious that competitors are having trouble and it seems like github has some kind of network effect lock-in anyway. It's a good question.
> It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.
At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.
People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.
I am aware, and I am often the one making that point -- but here we have someone who worked at heroku saying he experienced the SalesForce acquisition as immediately negative and with signals that it was not going to get better and this caused him to leave, so I was discussing within that narrative. I was more intersted in learning about his take from his experience than in trying to tell him he was wrong and salesforce was great for heroku despite his experience working there?
But yes, heroku from the outside kept doing quite well for the first years of Salesforce ownership, whether becuase they let them alone and kept their budget going, or whatever. That's why I suggested that from the outside github's slide was much faster.
idan (who again, tells us they worked at heroku) replied to me in this thread:
> Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
> It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
At the point we're quoting other people's replies in other parts of the thread becuase we're not all even having the same conversation anymore, we're probably done!
If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.
My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.
Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.
Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.
The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:
Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"Similarly, when writing Facebook apps with Rails, when you'd hit that same bug you'd see Mark Zuckerbeg: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4
These are the fun anecdotes that make perusing comments here so worth it. Thanks for sharing!
I love this story, makes me wonder how many other fun bugs on GitHub have been lost to time.
This is too funny. Thanks for sharing this tidbit!
1,202 if we're bragging.
TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.
Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.
I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.
I am 22095 on GH but 213 on Sourceforge :-D I have a 5 digit user id on Slashdot as well (~20k mark if I recall).
My Slashdot ID's under 4,000. It makes me a little sad that I can't bear to use it anymore.
My ICQ number was 5 digits. Was always funny towards "the end" when I'd give it to people and they'd wait for more digits.
Yeah, I haven't been there in years.
3-digit Slashdot user id, reporting in.
I, too, wish Slashdot was worth visiting again. I spent so, so many years there, enjoying the hell out of it since it was Chips&Dips ...
Surprised to find I am #79.
I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.
Congrats, never thought I'd see 2 digits in this thread haha
Ha, HN is exactly where I'd expect to see 2 digits personally
#72 here. Got access to contribute a small PR to one of Chris Wanstrath‘s projects.
I bow to you 7 times
Nice, someone even lower than my #297!
In fact now I think about it my claim to fame used to be that Github used one of my Rails plugins. I had written a really simple versioning system (Rails 2 I think) that I used for my blog and they used it, IIRC, for versioning wiki pages.
Mine is 2041.
When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)
I never thought about it before then.
Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.
I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.
I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.
I'm 17722 and also felt late. I was a holdout on Subversion and was resistant to Git in general since SVN still worked fine and had good tooling, but eventually some client work moved to Git and thus eventually Github.
We must have joined around the same time, 17498. Funny to call us late when this would have been July 2008, or ~3 months after public launch.
I'm ~46,0000 and I thought I was early!
I'm around 1M and I have a three-character username, which also feels like I was early
I was too loyal to mercurial, only switched to git/github long after the battle was lost and won.
Hah! I was too. I was at a bar with Chris trying to convince him to base the company off of hg instead of git but they already had the domain name and had already started building it.
13274 here!
Hello late bloomers, 143370 here
Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!
No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.
I was late to the party: 457,207
Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.
https://api.github.com/users/steveadams
Top million though! Still earliest 1%.
For comparison, I'm 208,820 and we're in the same year: I got that number 2010-02-23. So GitHub more than doubled user count that year, impressive for a "late to the party" growth.
https://api.github.com/users/fmalk
I'm at 18 years and ID 1653. It took them a while to gain traction.
They actually had meaningful competition back then, too. Bitbucket had free private repos and hg support! Back when that was still a topic.
hah, my cheat here is https://github.com/YOURHANDLE.png
Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D
I love that https://github.com/yourhandle is an existing organization.
Genuinely surprised that I'm only 2,187. Weird to think about how quickly I must have jumped on it.
My user id is in the 2,660,000s, 2012 here and I joined when I was 13.
I can't believe I joined Github back in 2009. I was a hardcore Mercurial fan and user back then. :)
April 27th 2010 and I felt pretty good getting a five character name (my own name). My ID is 254XXX
Around 40000 and a real name with 4 digits. Thought I was late.
In the 40k range too. I was too cheap at the time to pay for anything or else I would have signed up earlier.
10126 here. I wouldn't have guessed it was that low.
938555 / 07.26.2011, late for the game but man 15 years, memories came flooding back
You're going to crash the server.
Wow — I'm user 404!
I'm user angry unicorn... :}
It was going to crash, anyway.
Woah, January 2009 (in the 40,000s), like some others I felt I was late to the party. I guess not :).
And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.
wow, I'm in the 6.3 million group, 2014. I am surprised it's both that low and that old. Nothing compared to 5 or 6 digits, though. :D
Thanks for the link.
ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26
17 years, a month and two days ago.
33000 something, nov 2008. Just interesting to see how the growth escalated in 2009 judging by other comments here as well.
I was a day after you, march 27th. #67730
heh, beat you by three days, ID 65973, 2009-03-23 :)
366; nbd
https://api.github.com/users/nullstyle
133882 / Oct 1st 2009
Nice, mine is 5082
926648 checking in.
I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.
All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).
If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products.
The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.
This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.
The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.
The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.
You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.
So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?
> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.
Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.
Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."
Shrug
Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!
In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.
Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
> Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion.
Do you mean Git, not Github? Because Github is centralized by definition, “using it in a decentralized fashion” doesn’t make sense.
Github isn't a public good or a person; it's a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it's profitable.
I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.
> Occam's razor applies here
I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.
I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.
Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).
Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).
looks like you work at github.
I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
I don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.
Correct, sorry I thought this was pretty obvious but in retrospect maybe not.
I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.
And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
The problem is that you decided the correct place for your “version of his post” was in the comments to his version of his post. This rhetorically implies you’re offering your version as an alternative to his, and it explicitly sets up your version as a comment on his version.
And then you claim your version is only about you. Why post it as a reply, if that’s true? It would be off topic. But it isn’t off topic; because actually you are talking about OP in addition to yourself.
"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.
I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can't remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.
I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.
But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it's quality is suffering.
the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
I don't miss the days when every project had it's own SVN server....
Say what you will about github-the-source-control-platform, github-the-unified-login-for-bugtrackers has been a huge success.
As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.
If you are still hosting there I do not see how that means that you have totally given up on the thing.
Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.
And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms...
This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
Totally. And a small correction I think to your analogy is:
It's like crying when your favorite IRC network gets acquired by a crazy person (eg. Freenode) and refusing to jump onto libera.chat. I get network effects make a scene, but still, come on, new Freenode is not Freenode, it's just a name. Time to move on!
> Github is Microsoft
> Microsoft doesn't care about you
> why do you care about Microsoft?
You answered your own question there, mate.
I didn't? What's the answer? Sentimentality? Inertia?
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
At best that's half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.
Given the rot already evident, there really isn't any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.
Once product in large companies get to this point, there's no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it'll be put in product hospice.
> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale
Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.
Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap
What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.
“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)
Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!
Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.
The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?
The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.
Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda
It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.
I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services.
Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
> Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize?
My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount.
Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.
I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.
Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (<3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.
I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.
Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.
I appreciate that you're staying inside with that mentality.
Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.
Good luck, and we're all counting on you.
(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.
So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.
This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.
fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft's sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.
I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.
Fyi your HN description still says Heroku
derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!
huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.
Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.
I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
I'm user 7xx,xxx but I also believe I created a Github account while working on Rails projects (basically copying Ryan Bates and assembling things together. haha good times)
That was my connection too! I joined in 2008 when I got my first Rails gig where they were using GitHub, which I hadn't heard of before.
145XXX and I am on the other side of the world, no connection to SV at all
I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.
Where are you finding your join number on GitHub? I just spent a few minutes looking at my profile and settings, but I don't see it anywhere.
curl -s https://api.github.com/users/mitchellh | jq .id
You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s
github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G
shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it
[flagged]
First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
Thanks for the civility. I apologise for posting it as a reply to a wrong comment indeed.
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?
Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...
No AI needed at all. Only humans.
I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
What a weird time for our industry. On one hand, small teams have never been able to move faster than right now.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
This is not just the tech industry.
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
The hidden cost to competing in these industries is insane. Its so hard to build a physical product that can compete against a giant like IKEA. You need to make some with less r&d, less automation, less infrastructure and you're going to sell less units and all that needs to be price competitive against something that is made on an production line with a team of experienced engineers and sold to millions at fine margins.
> Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
Economies of scale make it so that your home made furniture will still be more expensive than ikea. Same for the Coca Cola example.
For tractor parts, you would still need to make sure they don't break and work within small tolerances.
That depends, doesn't it? If I make it, it costs time instead of money. (Costs of tools are amortized over all the things I might make.) If I get it from IKEA, it costs money instead of time.
> It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
In this case: these statements aren't contradictory, they're complementary. It's easy to publish a game on Steam, where the audience are and the money is. It's also easy to publish on itch.io where no money is.
It's not "you publish a game on Steam" - it's "Steam publishes a game that you made." But it's easier than ever to publish it yourself too.
I think org chart the impact is how the individual person can advance their career while doing good work. If they only get rewarded for new things, service and maintenance suffers.
It most certainly is also greed. Stockholders want returns. One way to do that is maximize profits at all costs. Greed.
How does low quality translate to shareholder returns?
By lowering cost and not investing profit to the company? Yes, short-term v long-term, but who in this world cares about anything after their next salary?
Shareholder returns translate to low quality because money is never reinvested in the business. Everything is cut to the bone.
What should we do? The only thing I can think of is to stay vocal about it. Never accept enshittification. Always point things out when they suck.
Not selling out, basically. Easier said than done.
If you have the choice to sell out or not sell out, the only logical decision is to sell out, because then you'll have lots of money and one presumes the product wasn't emotionally important to you. You can then move on to making your next product.
Couldn't have said it better. Whatever else you want to build in life will be exponentially easier if you sell out first, and many builders have many things they want to build and not just one.
Focus on open protocols, simple formats over complex vendor-specific cruft. Then you can always "fork" away from an enshittified saas.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
https://forgejo.org/ already exists, I suspect the issue would be hosting it at scale
DNS is the cause of all problems, but it's also the solution - just like anyone can run Apache or Nginx, so should anyone be able to run a git setup. Then it scales really well, as everyone is doing their own thing on their own domains.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
Anyone can run a git setup. You need git and SSH installed on a server and you need an SSH key for each user.
You don't need this. git and a local drive. git and a shared drive. git and an https engine (can be a plugin to apache/nginx, not a full github like solution). git and ssh but people use username/password.
Full github/gitlab: git and Gogs, Gitea, Forgejo.
[dead]
The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
> it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.
Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.
My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
We can; the tide changed to where it is now and can change again - and somebody will change it.
People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.
It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
That's the whole point - it's too easy to sit around on HN and bitch about enshittification - which just is enshittification!
We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.
One way it's possible is if the US ditches the two party system. We are starting to see some cracks in the partition recently with the Epstein files and the Israeli genocide. People from both sides are starting to realize they share a lot of common ground.
[dead]
That isn’t it. If you think bad weather and a flu is something to be scared of, try imagining what several thousand hydrogen bombs would do.
Leaving aside the reductionism, the difference is that we are already seeing the effects of the "bad weather" and we all lived through [1] (and, to a point, are still feeling the effects of) the "flu". No "ifs" about it.
There's no need to worry about a threat that has been theorized for 70 years (and may very well never happen) when there are actual, real catastrophes happening right now.
[1] Well, except for those who didn't make it through. They are not here by definition, but their memory is still fresh.
> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.
And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
Again, I am not criticising the feeling. It's okay to feel the way we feel.
I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.
It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.
Thanks for the downvotes though.
>The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?
Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.
Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.
Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
> Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era?
I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
Yes somehow, in a the sense that there are always things that we can observe as annoying when the representation of a situation where these issues are not present is easy to fantasize. But making actually disappear these annoyances is the hard part, plus the new situation have great chances to be bound to different annoyances that phantasms didn't anticipate. So the NP hard problem is being critique of our anticipations to try to avoid paths to bigger troubles, and keep steady effort on waking the path all while also paying attention to current sensory feedbacks of the situation on the road.
Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse.
Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.
React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
> React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing
Yes, it does.
> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.
It's also not tautological that React apps have bad error handling. You can do proper error handling and retry logic in React, and I can't for the life of me understand why GitHub engineers making several hundred thousand a year in cash and at least that much in stock simply... don't?
It's no wonder my jobs feed is flooded with senior engineering positions at GitHub (one wonders if they're growing, or jettisoning dead weight) but I can't imagine it's a good look for the resume to put GitHub on it at this point.
These are the super-engineers who created https://youtu.be/E3_95BZYIVs
Oh man, I'd actually forgotten about that!
What's hilarious about that script is that the solution is so simple: use a less-than comparison instead of an equals. That's really, really all it would have taken to fix the issue. And yet https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157 was opened on 2024-02-17 and was merged on 2025-08-21, a full 18 months (plus a few days) later! It took literally 18 months for them to merge a bugfix that is trivially obvious to see is correct.
Yeah, the problems at GitHub ran (and still run) deep.
P.S. Yes, there are busy-wait issues in that code, which should have been addressed by bringing back the check for the `sleep` command and using it if available, falling back on the CPU-burning busy-wait only if `sleep` was unavailable. But the most revealing thing is the 18 months to merge a trivial-to-verify PR. That, more than the bad busy-wait loop, is the fundamental indicator of brokenness at GitHub under Microsoft's ownership.
I'm so tired of this take that I've decided to create and publish a new React app every time I see it on HN.
This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
There's a big difference between a war between two somewhat equivalent things that make different choices (editor wars, language wars, etc.) vs pointing out that certain things are really fundamentally ... not good. IMO we all need to be much louder and clearer about how bad things are, and how much better they could be.
This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
That's what I've been saying this whole time! My hatred of Vim isn't a preference, vim is just fundamentally "not good"! Finally an intellectual.
It is certainly possible that you are brilliant and your co-workers and the industry writ large are all morons. That you were right all along, and chickens roosting and all that, though it seems at least equally as likely that this is not the case.
If you think it requires "brilliance" to figure out that Github Actions is really bad, and/or that "the industry writ large" always makes good decisions, you might be the problem!
(Needless) complexity is going on.
KISS and you sleep better.
That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)
Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.
GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
Yeah, I have been noticing weird things with Issues and PRs, including outdated state, for months now.
When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3]
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...
[2] see html source for tags
[3] https://my.githero.app/
[4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
Pull Requests is the thing that was wacky in the UI yesterday, coincidence or not? I have no idea.
Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.
I think the backend is just fucked. I have issues with Actions and the API all the time, not just the web UI
Also, the browser back and forward buttons no longer work in pull requests when going between PR tabs (commits, checks, files changed, etc) as well as some other site interactions.
Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.
Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.
Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
GitHub didn't have a CTO until 2017. Vlad Federov only started in 2024.
This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification:
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
I don't think companies know how to make a good product any more. Conway's law won this battle.
I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.
Slop didn't start with AI.
The West already forgot how to manufacture things, and we are now forgetting how to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879
When is the "get better" step? I've only ever seen two things happen mid- or post-enshittification:
It's not clear to me why "get shitty" is a necessary step to this. What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service that randomly prevents people from working"?> What part of GitHub's executives' grand plan is "have a barely-functional service
What about lock-in, being a monopoly? Why wouldn’t you maximize on saving costs? Sure some people leave, but the majority is not going anywhere. And if the platform dies they’ve made more money than to keep it alive.
The enshittification process milks the current product of all of the money that can be wrung from it by any means just shy of immolation.
Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.
That's why "get shitty" is necessary.
When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.
It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.
> It's not "enshittify or lose"
I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.
Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
Depends on how strong a moat really is, but it can be "enshittify and lose", too. Enlightened (as opposed to short-term) self-interest may pay off after two years or twenty, depending, and in the latter case, it may as well not pay off at all as far as a public company are concerned.
I think Microsoft’s home game is “monopolize and enshittify”. They are the masters and know the exactly what amount of enshittification is too much. E.g. Hashimoto quitting GH is probably totally worth the 10 SREs they fired. Us plebs cannot go anywhere.
But you totally can go somewhere else? E.g GitLab (which is, unfortunately, about as slow as GitHub, but with a better license and owner) or sr.ht.
If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
GitLab is definitely not as slow as GitHub, and it doesn’t matter because if you want to you can self host it, where it performs absolutely fine too
I mean the stars, social features and branding of Github make it more or less a lock-in. You can go somewhere else, but it’s not the same experience.
> If you think you need those sweet GitHub stars, I can't help you.
The majority of users need it.
Why not use GH just as a front page you mirror code. You keep your stars but develop elsewhere, on a server you control.
https://lists.sr.ht/~machocam/public-inbox/%3C46e343ec-c932-...
[dead]
It's move fast and break things.
I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that.
GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
The idea was, move fast and break things - but then pick them up and fix them. Companies realised they didn't really have to fix them properly as the users still stuck around.
[flagged]
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
Yes, exactly. AI isn't some magic dust that you can sprinkle into your workforce and get more productivity and better results. It is at best a force amplifier for what you already have. If you're making awful and broken products, you will make even more awful and even more broken products at a higher rate than before.
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
The .NET team is a counter example, aside from the GUI situation.
Microsoft had a very specific niche of making completely awful software that wasn't actually broken - in fact, that was often the infuriating thing.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
Homer: There's three ways to do things: the right way, the Microsoft way and the AI slop way.
Bart: Isn't that the Microsoft way?
Homer: Yes, but faster!
I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
I don't know if it's just because I was young and bright eyed, but it seems like the "passionate nerd" is somewhat absent in modern tech orgs. Seems like, starting around 6 years ago, none of the new hires seem to give a fuck about anything anymore.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
I'm still optimistic. I think the number hasn't gone down, just the ratio. Software still offers a relatively well paid and comfortable career, so you naturally get people who just want to do a good job and that's it. Nothing wrong with that.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
Github is going around boasting how many PRs they generate a day with Copilot with very limited human input. Whether that's true or not, it might have effect.
Deeper than that, but likely also that.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
When did every company become a feature factory? Was tech ever not like this, or is it just how it works? It seems like they all end up this way, and it's really dumb.
Software always was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law
Hardware, I don't know. Possibly always was too, I think even non-tech hardware was pushing more features as an excuse for shorter product lives back around the Great Depression, give or take a decade.
Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.
It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
AI slop is downstream of enshittification
Spool of Wire Guy or Wiregate refers to a viral video of a man (named Dan) telling his wife (Cindy) that a spool of wire he's had for 40 years is almost at its end
The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy
I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It's annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they're reflections on years past.
Damn
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.
> tears hit my keyboard
That is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).
On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.
PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.
> I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).
No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal.
For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this
To be honest, the blog post is quite a lot of self-indulgent waffle. But I forgive you for that, "each to their own", as they say.
What I won't forgive you for is writing such a long blog post and then completely missing the bottom-line.
Do not write "I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months".
If you're going to make me read such a long blog post, then at least have an answer ready-to-go for the critical question that everybody is going to ask !
Better yet don't write the post at all until you actually do something.
"I'm going to become a vegetarian" vibes.
I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.
Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.
If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.
Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.
There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.
I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).
Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you're crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.
Well yeah, and there is KDE 3 which was awesome. But for most of the projects their point stands.
KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system. For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn't work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...
Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you're emotional about it says more about how much you gave to that platform than anything else.
Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!
So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me:
> Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year
How could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?
I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook. And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years. So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.
> Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things.
We don't cry over things, we cry over what things mean.
I don't see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.
I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016.
https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq
We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.
You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.
You sure did keep it up.
Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.
Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”
… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.
Still, keep it up.
> Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.
Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)
You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.
my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.
I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.
I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message.
It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!
Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.
[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-git... [3] https://octocaptcha.com [4] https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw
The same thing happened to Twitter. All the online properties we used will be gutted and sunsetted eventually. The only thing we can do is move on and slash and burn a new pasture.
18 years is a good run as far as these things go.
I don't think it's nostalgia or rosy retrospection. The youths never experienced the old, magical internet. All they get is algorithmic hell.
> Nobody should cry over a SaaS
This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.
> I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek
I wasn’t that invested in StackOverflow but still I was quite invested there.
I do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it.
I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong.
Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place.
GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.
I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused.
Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?
It's probably not GitHub as such, but the associated memories and experiences. You never miss a place, you miss the feeling of happines you had when you were there, or the people you spent time with there.
People get emotional over a car, over a house, over a pet... you could argue for everything it's just a car/house/pet... you can get a new one.
Putting pets in that same category is harsh. Pets are family members, living things that you share a home and good times and experiences with.
I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It's the meaning behind it: the hacker spirit, the naive curiosity, the juveline freedom, being destroyed by the corporate machine. It is a small metaphor that hits all of us in different spots.
And boy, does it hurt.
GitHub died when MS bought it. It was great back in the day, it shaped a lot of modern day FOSS culture but now it's just MS.
We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade.
To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-)
"Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
"I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."
I thought you like worked there but with the additional context that you never did, yeah cringe
I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you.
I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.
And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.
It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.
Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.
Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.
I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that's so antithetical to where my career began and what I thought was possible. I want to believe we can do better, and ideals can still matter in software.
And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.
Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (except maybe github actions, which seems to get 10x the attention it deserves); the challenge is I perceive far better solutions to be chosen which would serve the open source world if we simply deploy a slight increase in cognitive energy.
Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid.
Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.
For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.
Not everyone can do it. Respect.
It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.
If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.
I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.
I'm interested to see where you land the project at post-GH. The platform has just not grown in the ways I had hoped and their reliability has been a real issue for awhile now.
I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.
"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."
Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing
Completely understand the work/life/hobby fusion.
And I think that you and GitHub went through the stages of life together. They probably weren't exactly parallel, but I bet you measure and remember your life through GitHub's life to some degree, along with the projects you had there.
There's no question that with your drive and acumen that you could build the GitHub that you both had and want. It might be your next chapter.
I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life.
That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.
> I have an unhealthy relationship with it.
You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things.
> Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub
This is addiction
Yeah I agree. I'm not going to pick on someone for having an unhealthy relationship with a product such that they get weepy when it goes downhill. But I do hope he recognizes how unhealthy it is, and works to improve that.
It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.
If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I'm very interested to hear about it.
> GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better
Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.
It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public.
GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.
I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.
Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)
I love the ideas and motivations underpinning Github's creation. For a long time Github was the best instantiation of those ideals. Maybe not so much anymore. Transitions are always the most difficult but they often result in new perspectives.
Forgive me if you’re not in a solutioning phase right now … but how motivated are you to fix this?
I’m a big fan of ghostty and also unenamoured with the current state of GitHub and Microsoft.
That is to say I believe this is an opportunity to disrupt the incumbent player and I’m game. HMU if you feel similar and want to discuss.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.
One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.
Here's the track for this moment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuNyMxLlVig
:)
I don't have much of an opinion about Github, but I just want to add that your feelings are valid. It is not a stupid thing and I hope nobody is making fun of you for crying over it.
Take care.
Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.
Do you think this is endemic to large software organizations today, or are our needs (and the corresponding complexity) just outstripping the ability of old business models to address it?
People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.
Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn't and ever since Microsoft took it over, it was just run into the ground.
I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.
The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
I'm a bit lost about the problem. Is it really about crying about outages? I'm aware of enshittification issues in the broader tech field but the post and this comment don't really say what the problem is. If this is supposed to be some kind of signal and wakeup call, more info would help. For context I'm a lightweight Github user for over a decade, mostly putting up personal projects without much collab, and opening issues in other repos when I find bugs, just cloning and forking stuff (mainly in the machine learning community, but also in general Linux tools). For me it works okay enough, compared with the overall landscape of SaaS. I'm not a fan, don't feel any loyalty and my expectations for user abuse from big tech are admittedly pretty abysmal by now. I'm just not seeing what specifically happened with github to trigger this.
> Is it really about crying about outages
You mean being affected by the constant outages that make the product literally unusable? If you were doing any serious work with it you might understand.
Thanks, I thought there was some other kind of flareup recently. This seems like bog standard service provider stuff. When my Vodafone internet connection has a lot of outages, I switch to another ISP. Same here. No need to overdramatize it. Use GitLab or whatever else.
Was it the platform or the people? The people would be out there doing things without GitHub and they will be there doing things without GitHub.
Your emotions are totally valid, and I can empathize. You fell in love with a community that slowly got eroded away and no longer exists.
No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked.
I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.
You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.
Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', then there are 10 different competitors ready to take over, and I hope some of them do. Better for the ecosystem to have a strong element of competition. Perhaps their time as top dog is ending, and it's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.
What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?
Vagrant I used a lot early on in my career to learn Ruby on Rails in Windows. Thanks a lot for your work!
God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow
So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan.
Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?
What’s the next phase? Billionaires manage to seize the means of bunker protection and remote-control the commoners into the wilderness?
You mean the AI that might fail and suck every last ounce of entropy or life out the planet and sufficate it? Have you seen the insane amount of natural gas being burned to power it? Obviously I'd love if AI solved its own energy crisis but that hasn't even begun to happen yet. You think it will invent cold fusion? Room temp super conductors? Solar cells past our theoretical limits? Do you realize it's literally being controlled by human greed?
It isn't just greed controlling it too, so I'm also optimistic. I'd just also like seeing the light powering it at the beginning of the tunnel.
It's not going to do any of these things, because it's auto-complete.
No, it won't bypass P≠NP either.
What about P vs. NP? Is auto-complete able to create P solutions and then perform NP verification by interacting with experiment or calculation IO? Couldn't it test solutions faster than a human on problems with massive solution spaces like folding proteins or aligning electron-hole pairs?
we can be ai-powered, we can be engineers.
but most of all we’re humans :)
happy to see that some humans can still feel emotions, real emotions, and not be ashamed by them.
You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!)
This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:
You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.
More importantly, Mitchell, you care.
Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.
In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.
Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
Do you know where you’re going yet?
I feel this way, although less emotional, with Unity.
Unity taught me how to program and , along with JavaScript turned me from a college dropout to a software engineer.
Finished my degree later.
I still love Unity, but the company is stable. If I friend needs help with a Unity project, I'm down, but I start all my new games with Godot.
I'm not sad though. Unity is like a friend I'm still cool with, we just drifted apart.
But from a realistic point of view. Did we really think Unity and GitHub were charities in pursuit of the greater good.
Of course not. They cashed out, made money and whatever good they did along the way was a nice side effect.
People will comfort you about your emotions and your tears and then tell you you’re wrong to feel sad about it. They’re lying to you. Your instincts about how you feel are completely correct.
The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy.
I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.
Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.
I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.
It's not stupid to share your emotions towards a platform you've grown passionate of, especially when since Microsoft's acquisition, the platform has become enshittified, and now, vibe coded to an extent that there is not a single week where there are no issues with the platform.
Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?
hug
Thank you for your hard work.
the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.
Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D
> I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing.
Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.
"They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."
Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.
Naw I did the same after I got "piled" on at Metafilter a few years back, and after 18-years buttoned my account because I was sick of the toxicity (I am an ancient BBS/usenet guy from decades ago - I can handle "flamewars"). I am pretty "left-leaning" liberal, but the "purity tests", insular nature and extreme "wokeness" that place has turned into has basically ruined it. They have monthly meta discussions/threads on why they are losing attention/participation, yet they don't seem to recognize that they drive people away.
Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")
Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?
Dude, get some help
chill dude
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No serious person would make fun of this emotional reaction. It seems technology had something going on, and it quickly got flooded by incompetence and greed.
We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology. I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here.
Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.
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And everyone else thinks less of you for the fact that you are up in arms over a perfectly harmless word.
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This is not good intentioned, you're a jerk, and it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
There is absolutely nothing normal or healthy about being so attached to a source control repo that you cry when you replace it. I'm not saying OP is right about testosterone levels (how the hell would I know, I'm not a doctor), but everyone telling Mitchell "it's ok to feel things" is doing him a grave disservice. He has a very unhealthy attachment to Github and he needs to work on it, not have people validate his unhealthy behavior.
> This is not good intentioned
On what are you basing that?
> it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
Yes it is and I didn't claim it wasn't, so this is a strawman.
There's nothing personally indicting about having low testosterone. It's relatively common and it's potentially a serious medical condition. There is no reason to take offense from this.
Becuase you're associating their reaction to "a serious medical condition" because it is "not normal."
I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor.
My assessment of your intentions was wrong, as I can't know that, but I stand by the other two statements.
> I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor.
I don't see a reason to counter anything I said. I offered neutral information that may help the OP. If the OP's testosterone levels are indeed low due to a serious medical condition, then you've just done them a major disservice. Even if you're of the opinion that it's normal, it's reasonable for someone else to assess that feeling sadness to the degree of provoking tears in response to deciding not to use productivity software is a cause for concern.
I appreciate the sentiment.
The point I was making in my initial reply was in response to the trivialization of what someone else cares about ("sad enough to cry over productivity software"). That to me is by definition judgmental.
I don't believe there is a universal list of things that is OK to care deeply enough to cry about. There are plenty of things you would cry about that I would not, but I can understand why you would care deeply about those things. Or maybe you are of the opinion that crying isn't allowed at all. Which is also an opinion.
> That to me is by definition judgmental.
My use of "judgmental" was to communicate that my intention was not to pass judgment on his worth as a person or his worthiness of respect as a person or professional in me providing honest feedback about his behavior.
> I don't believe there is a universal list of things that is OK to care deeply enough to cry about.
It's not about prescribing when it's OK to cry or trivializing what he's sad about, it's about deviations from average behavior. The vast majority of emotionally well-adjusted men usually only cry at the death of a loved one or during a divorce or serious break-up. Here's data on that: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/51961-the-who-what-where-w... To find yourself crying in a situation different from those situations should raise a red flag. Yes it may be the case that it's not a sign of anything serious but given the rarity of the situation, it's reasonable to suspect there may be something else at play, e.g. low testosterone.
Men must be going through a lot of breakups and deaths!
26% have cried in the last week
39% have cried in the last month
64% have cried in the last year
> Becuase you're associating their reaction to "a serious medical condition" because it is "not normal."
Weak man argument. They said low T is "potentially" a serious condition.
Tools can be frustrating. We can get emotional with tools we appreciate and we grew up with. But we should also learn to not focus solely on work efficiency. As you say yourself, this is unhealthy. You've labeled it, now work on fixing that unhealthy relationship with work, and with that tool.
Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day.
We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties.
Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc
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/
> insider perspective on this
I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.
I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
I'm sure there are countless other examples.
The problem IMO is that they filled GitHub with Microsoft folks who just don't have the engineering self-sufficient hacker culture that is required to balance the "attraction park" vibe that GitHub paired it with. So now it's just an attraction park for Microsoft employees to go and do silly work with teams of 100 that should have been done by a skilled team of 5 hackers.
I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.
They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.
Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.
> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
What do you mean "we keep falling for it"? I remember after the acquisition there were tons of projects that left for Gitlab or other forges on principle of boycotting Microsoft. And for the many who stayed on Github, we still got about 6 years of pretty great free services before reliability really started to decline.
And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world.
I remember discussions at the time where people predicted that this would certainly happen. If people “keep falling” for it, it’s not the same people. And Microsoft certainly wasn’t (and isn’t) a company you’d trust for such statements.
Yet some people did trust them for it.
But you’re right that it probably wasn’t the same people that got burned by 90s Microsoft.
Satya got his own line of "maybe Microsoft's not evil anymore" press cycles out of it.
This Disney brain of the Americans is what the problem is. It's not good guys and evil guys. It's money. Money and power have mechanisms. Pinky promises, benevolence etc. don't mean anything in capitalist business. It doesn't mean it has to be all thrown out the window. It can provide a service for a price, you can take it. Without being invested emotionally, without brand loyalty. That's dummy stuff. Businesses are not charities, and even charities are often quite businesslike. Unlearn naivety, read literature, human culture has known about the effects and incentives around money and power, petty and grand, for a long time.
One of the mechanisms of both money and power is to inhibit and derail the production of people who question and contest.
Who is "we", exactly?
Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right.
Your "we" is misplaced.
> It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit.
I'm not sure who "we" is in this story, but the _most_ optimistic of my peers pointed to typical MS projects of that scale having a little proper investment in interesting features and also taking at least a couple years to fail. HN sentiment wasn't positive either. The 99th percentile in favor of MS were fine with it, but the 90th percentile recognized the M&A for what it was, especially as specific features started showing their colours.
Lest this come across as a drive-by insult, I'm actually very curious who "we" is. Humanity is a very, very broad spectrum, and my intuition often doesn't appropriately capture the divers backgrounds of real people, despite spending large amounts of time with (usually from working alongside) deck-hands, captains, sanitation workers, bankers, pilots, jackhammer operators, semi drivers, farmers, programmers, mathematicians, and a host of other people. The gap I'm seeing is likely in my understanding (rather than, e.g., the post being mal-formed), so I'd like to correct that.
GitHub had no reason to sell to Microsoft, they could have remained the bootstrapped company they started as, and rode the SaaS boom, since they were profitable on day 1. Seems a bit unfair to blame Microsoft though, because it was the founders who decided they wanted that sweet VC funding and Andreessen was happy to pay out.
Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.
Would definitely read a book about this.
> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.
Sorry, why the hell would any company do this? Goodwill is measured by MBA's in pennies and they paid *billions*.
This is like that time Google acquired the .dev domain "to reserve it for developers" but then ended up selling it- like everyone said they would.
You have got to be absurdly naive to believe that Microsoft does altruistic things, if there's no direct (or indirect) business they're not doing it: they are famously not a charity.
They have to be the richest men on the planet, retire, and then they'll do some charity.. perhaps because they feel guilty about what they did on an island or something.
This happens with almost every acquisition from Red Hat to WhatsApp.
If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.
GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.
All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.
> I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money
A lot of companies say that when they acquire another, and it might be true for a few years, it might even be the actual intention of the people involved in making the acquisition, but it usually doesn't last.
> It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. call me a skeptic, but can (and has) such a model existed in a capitalist system?
It has never existed. Everything a business does is for power and profit, including the times when they pretend they aren't doing things for power and profit.
* I quoted wrong. Sorry, still new here
This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.
> I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition.
It's called a vesting schedule. ;)
What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.
For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
This is the flipside of MBA-brain. Treating people as replaceable equivalent cogs in a machine, thinking that the company itself, as an abstraction, is where value lies, when it lies just as much in the context and nurishing environment. You can't simply move a company from one place to another like a Lego brick and expect it to go on functioning as before, not as long as people have freedom to leave.
> but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves
I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.
I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.
I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.
It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.
Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?
Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
I'm afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more "normal", less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more "normal" as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product/service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I'd like to know how to avoid it.
“I'd like to know how to avoid it.”
To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”
Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.
The process is necessary for both sides. Acquisition by large companies is the primary way that people get rewarded for building good things. If you take it away, there won't be many startups left - all new developments will come from the big companies that can afford them, and only the types of developments those companies' managers want to make.
It's only "necessary" if one accepts that the current way is the only way.
I'm not really sure what the point of encouraging new development is if the end result is "big company scoops it up and makes it shitty, but people get to enjoy it for a few brief moments before that happens."
That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.
In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.
Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).
It's not inevitable that the founders have to sell to big tech. They wanted money more than the excellence of the craft. They got the money, the company got to grow and made way more profit than when it was small scale but excellent. The wheel keeps turning.
There might be a few (debatable) counter-examples: 37 signals, balsamiq, zoho?
Afaik they never took any (serious) VC money.
I was referring to the case where the founders and investors sell the startup to larger company. Of course, if they don't sell, and the company stays founder-led, the outcome is often better. I didn't know Zoho never took (serious) VC money.
I use only self hosted free software. Admittedly it's not for everyone. But solves the issue for me.
> CA (where software goes to die)
CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.
Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.
Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.
It's just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.
It's very profitable in the short term, and later they can just move on elsewhere and do it to another company. It's not mismanagement at all, it's a solid strategy from the external point of view.
> Everything becomes the numbers game.
Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.
Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!
> GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters
Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?
Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day.
https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25
In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is.
If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical
Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
As someone who relies on it for all of my workflows at a normal job, core functionality issues result in me not being able to get work done on at least a weekly basis reliably at this point, and it's been that way for months.
The things aren't profile pictures not loading in saudi, they're botching merge jobs, git/api operations being down, pull requests not loading, etc. And that's on top of the plethora of UI bugs that have been pervasive for years that aren't blocking functionality.
This. I feel like there should be a developer uptime index that measures these things that we use every work hour.
And it should not depend on their status page which seems to take a while to catch up when there's an actual outage.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?services=api-requests.actions.gi...
You can pick whichever services you feel fall into this category in the top.
For the bundle I chose, there have only been 3 totally clean weeks so far in 2026 :/
Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in.
Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.
Oh yea I'm not trying to defend it as amazing or tolerable, just clarifying the actual benchmark/reality of their performance!
I think at least three 9's would be the baseline. But I'm also sympathetic that they had a *post-exit* scaling of write volume of like, idk, 1000x???
Very few orgs would survive that kind of scale and retain three 9's.
We don't have to let it be a utility service. It's not like the power and water to your house where laying new pipes is a monumental and stupid effort. $3 per month can get you a VPS to run your git hosting on - if you even need git hosting, and aren't just using GitHub because it's there.
That is a much more reasonable look, I am glad you alleviated our wor-
Why is the graph more dense on the right side?
Wait, this is insane! And the method they use to classify an outage seems solid as well. Imagine being a Github dev working in this environment.
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 :(.
Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware/crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.
Microsoft specializes in taking successful products and pumping them full of malware, spyware, bloatware, and adware once they have a critical mass of users. It is often preceded by quality dropping significantly due to under investment and McKinsey being brought in to find a way to prop up declining revenues - of course the answer is never to invest in making it a superior product again, but monetization strategies.
Mostly, but they were injecting ads into PRs if I recall.
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.
Not always, but it was so long ago that it became that, younger folks could be forgiven for thinking so.
I do remember early SourceForge. It remember it as very clean, simple and reliable, and popular.
Not popular. Core. It was the trusted place for open source software. Then it was ads. Then the day they bundled there was a MASS exodus. And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
> And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.
And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!".
And so it goes.
I mean, we got ~15 years of great service out of them for free. I used to pay for my own servers in colo for all the stuff Github has been providing for free all that time. It'll suck to move, but I've done it before. It's hard to turn down the loss leader they want to give me, when it's a really good product. Now that it's stopped being a really good product, maybe it becomes easier to turn down, I dunno.
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.
So you were ~10 years old. I'll assume not a heavy user of Open Source software, at that time.
Edit: 2001, I see one (1) banner ad, and that ad was seemingly for an OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) conference. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforg...
Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
For whatever it's worth, which is probably not much, I'm in my late 40s and I never really liked sourceforge either. Too many clicks to do anything (still true), and I didn't like cvs (also still true, but thankfully now irrelevant).
(My SF account dates from June 2004. I expect I was thinking about using it as version control for a FOSS project I was working on at the time, though I don't know why, as it seems SF didn't support svn until 2005. Maybe I couldn't find any better options? The pre-GitHub ecosystem was pretty bad! But, luckily, I ended up not having time for any FOSS stuff from about autumn 2004, so: problem solved. And when I next looked, in early 2010, everything seemed to be git+github, and all the better for it.)
CVS was the best option when SourceForge began, and Subversion was barely an improvement. SourceForce was critical to the growth of Open Source and Free Software in the 00s. Projects no longer needed to maintain their own revision control server, file server, forum, issue tracker, etc. SF.net wasn't great compared to any of the current generation of hosting services. And, most Open Source projects were in an uncomfortable state of looking around for alternatives by the time Github arrived in 2008, because it was slow to adopt newer technologies and was running on a skeleton crew. Most of my projects had their own forums/issue trackers, and were self-hosting git, by then. Ads stopped being a usable revenue strategy, so SF.net stopped being able to keep up with what developers wanted.
But, it had a few years where every OSS developer I knew had nothing but positive feelings toward SourceForge. It gave one of the projects I work on thousands of dollars worth of transit over the years. It's hard for folks who've only ever worked on an "everything for small developers is a loss leader" internet to understand that we used to pay for and manage our own servers. I had a $200/month bill for just my Open Source projects on a couple of colocated servers.
Yes, SourceForge went through a lot of shitty stuff. The overtly hostile stuff (adware inserted in OSS projects) happened after it changed hands. But, when the revenue of their original model dried up and they couldn't stay on top of new development (being slow to offer a good git experience was a fatal mistake).
Anyway, it's not great now (though it is now owned by seemingly decent folks, who haven't really been able to find a way to make it work), and it went through a period where it was a borderline criminal enterprise, but it started out as a genuinely helpful part of the OSS community.
Yeah you're too young. You need to be in your 40s (or older) to have been around in the open source community when Sourceforge was good.
(To quote a famous TV series... :-) Oh my sweet summer child
Not always. Before dice bought them they didn't do the ads. I even remember early on when you had to submit a project for approval before you got a CVS repo.
> SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements.
I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy.
Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge.
Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience.
[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/...
> The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.
Microslop only really cares about the enterprise customer. Those are slow to change, so once they're in github, they'll stay forever.
> I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this
I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.
Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.
A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don't load. Or PRs literally don't appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It's a daily occurrence to play the 'is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?' game.
Oh, and don't forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the 'new experience' and the 'legacy view'. You just can't trust it as much anymore.
Oh so it's not even CI/CD, just showing PRs. That's awful.
Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can't ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.
Mostly the Actions outages, but yes.
All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional?
GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
While I wouldn't necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.
They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.
Oh you're right, I misread. They're actually blaming their customer's vibe coding on their problems. I which case I call BS
In our internal metrics you can see a clear increase in PRs and CI runs in general that tracks with agentic coding adoption, and it's significant, so I absolutely buy that GitHub would be struggling to take the brunt of that without big changes
But GitHub's postmortems are usually related to internal rollouts rather than traffic load
A charitable view might be that changing which fingers you're using to plug the holes in the dike is a lot harder when the volume of water on the other side is increasing exponentially.
[dead]
> crumble as an organization
I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub
literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?
Even if you go service by service you're talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they're named for) at a single nine, and stuff that's pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can't even keep static webpages up.
So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.
i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle. It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios
wow, I knew it was bad but I was gaslighting myself a bit. 0 9's is crazy.
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.
> 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.
Seeing KDE and Gnome come together isn't exactly uncommon but it still warms my heart reading about it.
Unlike their fanbases, KDE and Gnome teams collaborate all the time
...until it comes to bikeshedding new standards
GitLab cloud lost some of my projects. And it was (is?) quite slow. Props to those who can keep it running self hosted.
I kept a Docker install of GitLab running for many years at my first full time employer out of university back in 2014 to 2020. It was really not too difficult. Every once a while they would release a major version that required a migration or config update, but mostly the updates were a docker compose pull and docker compose up away. At our single company scale with only some 25 developers max (don't remember exactly anymore) a self-hosted instance on a moderate VM was super stable and quite boring. And boring is often good. It might be that hosting GitLab for much bigger organizations is a different beast!
I remember that the first instance of their CI solution was a separate server/service that coordinated CI jobs on runners. That was a bit cumbersome. But then they integrated the CI coordination into the main server and you only needed to figure out the CI runner part.
Today I would likely have gone for Forgejo with runners for such a small company if I were to self-host. Less moving parts and smaller footprint.
Just moved our stuff from gitlab to forgejo. Gitlab is fine. Just too much stuff for a small org. And I hated the upgrades. And they kept adding things and none of those were what I wanted :) guess a different audience or something. very good to have some options though!
It's actually much faster when self hosted, even on modest hardware. And it's not _that_ bad to manage with docker (for how much it provides).
It can be run as a single docker container, so it's actually very easy to self host. Occasionally it'll get into a 500 conniption and needs a restart, but you can create a healthcheck for that.
Which features were moved? I would have thought required mandatory approvals would be the first ones to be moved.
I have had my eye on these technologies for a while. Embedding the issue tracker and such in your git repo. Every day these make more and more sense.
- https://gitsocial.org/
- https://radicle.dev/
- https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
I made the decision to leave Github a couple months ago when I retired and started heavily working on personal projects. I like the idea of radicle and used it for a while, but it's complicated to set up and maintain if you want to run your own seed node and pin your personal projects.
What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.
A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.
https://kilimanjaro.io if you want to see what it looks like.
I would agree with everything you say, but why not both?
We are actually facing 2 distinct problems:
- Github is a centralized, controlled git hosting, identity, collaboration platform.
- Bots are attacking any public facing interface.
So maybe the solution is:
- to keep a Radicle node private/behind fences to lower the maintenance/security burden, with eventually access to selected collaborators.
- publish the repos with a static site generator like pgit
Indeed really quick and responsive
Exactly this. Even though I don't use git-bug anymore, I'm still a sponsor. I desperately want an issue-tracker-in-.git to become a standard.
Issues and CI are the only lock-in. The latter is legitimate because you're using someone else's CPU, but every developer has the tooling to "git diff" and write comments if we could just agree on a format.
I have trouble wrapping my head around how to make it so the public can create an issue in your git repo.
They can clone the repo, make changes, and then push. On the server, you can have a hook that checks if the commit only contains appropriate issue changes, and apply just those.
Sure, a little more complicated than “Create Issue”, but not that much for devs. We could even simplify the workflow with e.g. git-issue or something like that, similar to e.g. git-send-email.
I'm not a fan because it makes the change log mostly issue tracking and not actual changes.
Using a separate Git repo with a defined naming structure I could appreciate.
(e.g. gitrepo.org/project and gitrepo.org/project_issues )
Radicle is such a cool concept and seems to be working great. The only thing it needs is a better way to search through the projects hosted on each node.
The centrality of GitHub was part of its appeal. It’s where you went to see where nearly every (obviously not all) open source project was being developed. Based on his post, the network effect was a large part of the draw and the reason he stayed despite reliability issues. A more federated set of git UIs will never capture the same feeling.
I could imagine something like the mastodon protocol but for git forges, where even though they are separate websites there would be no true boundary to discoverability/interaction
They're all just value propositions. Is it worth my time and money? There ya go that's it.
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
> I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
I think that model works well when it comes to code, but I don't think the non-free software movement ever really figured out how to deal with services and data. Even if GitHub was completely 100% GPL Free Software... the user accounts and everyone's comment history and stuff lives on a database somewhere. The servers are running somewhere. That's where the community is.
Even if you could take GitHub and spin up your own fork running the exact same software, the community isn't there. The interactions aren't there, the history isn't. It's like building a clone of your childhood house and wondering why your young parents don't magically appear in it.
You're completely right. I care about the free software movement from an ethical/freedom-preserving perspective, and I do think that many facets of the movement are too grounded in the details of how personal computer software in the 80s and 90s worked, rather than in the question of how to import the user-freedom-perserving ethos to services and data.
The question of how to create free-software-mediated online communities that don't involve storing user identity and data in a company's private database is critical. The user database, and what can be built upon it, is the single biggest reason people do use Github despite its flaws.
Is the problem solved by an open database license? Doesn't that make a community migration easier, putting a cap on how enshittified any given database can become?
I don't think the community of GitHub matters as much as people keep saying here. I think each project has its own small number of developers, and getting all of them to move is much easier. It has a larger number of bug reporters and downloaders, who only interact with the project occasionally and are perfectly capable of doing the same thing anywhere else.
> On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
Since we’re getting all philosophical, heartbreak isn’t inherently bad, it means you had the opportunity to love something deeply. Being engaged in the world means taking risks on things that might disappoint you. I do wish more of that love were directed at open source, but it’s not as if open source is without heartbreak and disappointment. Richard Stallman is sort of emblematic of someone who starts out with good intentions, but whose paranoid risk aversion probably put a ceiling on his potential?
I've never understood the enthusiastic sharecropping for Github. It's a reasonable tradeoff to let Github own the public home for your code, but no reason to be happy about it.
This is orthogonal imo. There are plenty of services that work really well that are closed source
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.
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.
This is fantasticly poetic!
Also they own your code in any real sense.
Are you… explaining the effects of being acquired to Hashimoto?
But keep in mind the demographics of chat. 80% of the commenters are much smarter and more knowledgeable than the other 80%.
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.
The problem is that Github does a lot.
However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.
In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
But how much of that do people actually need? Most users don’t use most features. The core MVP is not that big.
The old saying goes: Everyone only uses 10% of what MS Excel can do. But everyone uses a different 10%.
The same goes for Github to a degree. Yes, there are hot paths that "everyone" uses, but also areas where most people never wander and other use daily.
Google Docs doesn't do even 20% of what Office does, but it's a serious competitor anyway. That's because it implements a 5% feature that 80% of its customers use: instant internet sync.
Does it do anything that GitLab does not?
With what I heard about GitHub Actions, the GitLab CI pipelines should be much better.
Not that I haven’t shot myself in the foot with GitLab pipelines on numerous occasions.
Xit has a better “take” on Git. Pijul & Darcs still have better fundamentals.
worse is better
pujil's patch alebgra is sick but the whole system implementation is so complex my guy is still toiling away on it, unfinished, after half a decade
Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?
Dojo is such an obvious thing, but its such an obvious thing that there are dozens of software trying to call themselves that.
Dojjo then?
Dojjjo, pronounced do-jj-jo
Now we're talking!
At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
You just don't have to think about it too hard:
jjplace/jjhub/codetown, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.
Case in point: Apple Computers.
having it include the word App is genius
Nike is the Greek goddess of victory.
I often daydream about what a magical "life scoreboard" would have on it, some universe-aware program counting arbitrary things. I'd love for such a scoreboard to display "percentage of Nike shoe owners that know Nike is the Greek goddess of victory."
I would guess under 10%, and only that high because Nike sells shoes in Greece and Italy.
JitHub.
("Please don't sue us.")
GitHub, but it's pronounced with a soft G, like the peanut butter.
This is hilarious & the best name to use honestly
you don't have to name your forge after the VCS it's based off of.
JujutsuJunction (Ju³), obviously.
jub
JubHub
> forgesu
Mi vidas kion vi tie faris.
It does a lot but at the end of the day, if the core functionality is just not good anymore, maybe put all the side projects on the actual side and focus on how to make sure core functionality suck less.
For example - We adopted GitHub Actions, then we swapped it out this year. Our own primary use case is code hosting + PRs. We want it to talk to the other (better) tools that intended for their use case. We want it in a secure yet fast and available manner. Nothing else. I don't care about projects, issues, or whatever super app they're trying to become.
I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges. The only compelling reason for everyone to centralize on GitHub is collaboration on issues/PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone's ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. https://v-it.org/
It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
Interesting project, thanx.
Also nice language evolutions: "socialize their changes to projects", "lo-fi approach" :)
> I'm still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges.
Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
I say this as someone who actually ran mailservers for about 25 years, who can telnet to port 25 and type SMTP to send an email, and who is hugely found of plaintext: I'd rather quit coding than move to that workflow. I loathe every bit of the pipeline of getting a clean patch from machine A to machine B, where I control at most one of them, and having it come out the other side with the same SHA256 digest. I don't look down on people who prefer it: to each their own! But I'll never in a million years understand it. Say what you will about the GitHub-style PR process, and there's plenty to say about it!, but there's a reason that devs outside LKML and the *BSD mailing lists pretty much immediately leapt onto GitHub the moment it became widely known. It was a revelation.
In this workflow, I don't think it's meant to have the same SHA1 digest. It's a workflow that's very much designed for a handful of core contributors (who have direct repository access) and gatekept one-off patches.
Some other accepted git workflows, like rebasing onto master, or even adding a "committed-by" or "signed-off-by", don't preserve SHA1 hashes either, and it seems you don't really need that property outside of closely collaborating cliques.
I get your point and maybe my tone was snarky (not a native speaker). But why would you want an exact reproduction on the other side? The diff format is human-readable for a reason, so slight errors can be fixed quite easily (if they do happen). Extracting patches from a well-configured MUA can be done quickly too.
Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.
Every time Fossil comes up, people's big objection is that you can't squash commits. Personally, I'm fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn't expect it to become big like git is.
Mailing patches is the same as squashing commits. The Linux kernel would be much harder to maintain without messy history being carefully distilled down to well crafted patches.
But mailing patches is a pain in the ass. VCSes should support squashing and rebasing.
Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.
I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that.
if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.
however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).
so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.
gitlab.xfce.org is absolutely not a full-time job. It's run by one guy in his spare time, and that spare time doesn't even amount to a part-time job.
I do agree about performance, though.
> managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.
Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?
Hundreds or 10k+ users?
I imagine requirements and integrations may differ a lot. I have seen many incidents with a large instance.
The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO
And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.
- "Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess"
- "Uuh, no"
Be a pretty quick story
He would pull them away from co-pilot and the unlimited spigot of money that agentic coding brings, which is contrary to the best interests of Microsfot.
> 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".
Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.
At least as far as I can tell, Gitlab seems to be used a lot more than the other two. I don't think I've ever gone to a page for a SourceForge project that was created after maybe 2012 or so, and although it's possible I've looked at a project on Codeberg or Forgejo, I can't think of a single one off the top of my head. Meanwhile, I've run into projects on Gitlab (either gitlab.com itself or a self-hosted version) at multiple employers and various Linux codebases and packages (Plasma and Gnome desktop environments and other various windowing-related software, Arch Linux package sources, etc.).
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
Note that SourceForge is very different from Sourcehut. Sourcehut is a self‑hostable software forge that can be interacted with by email even without an account. I'd forgotten about GitLab. I guess it's annoying enough that I repressed it.
I'm a bit confused; from what I'm seeing, no one mentioned SourceHut until now. Did you make a typo before?
> Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
Oh shoot, I must have been more tired than I thought. I definitely meant Sourcehut, not Sourceforge.
Gitlab's interface makes me want to cry every time I have to use it. I would not recommend it to someone who misses classic GitHub. Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea would be a much better match.
What, cause it is too busy?
I haven't made a comprehensive list, but off the top of my head:
- frequently needed navigation links buried within menus within other menus
- menus labeled by mysterious icons, sometimes with mysterious text, sometimes with no text at all
- authentication system that has failed me in a variety of ways over the years, even locking me out of an account in one case
- client-side script execution required to do anything all, even simply display a file
As I said, I haven't kept a list, but GitLab is very much in the category of interfaces that were built by javascript fanatics who don't understand (or don't care about) ergonomics or privacy. I accept that not everyone is bothered by its many problems, but I avoid it when I can.
Doh, I completely forgot about GitLab. OK so that's 3 services. I'm only counting hosted services that aim at serving all comers and providing an entire platform similar to GitHub. Individual disconnected instances, while useful, aren't a replacement for the social aspect of GitHub.
I think both gitlab and forgejo are working on federation.
https://forgefed.org/
Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea
Oh, I'd forgotten about GitLab and Bitbucket. How is Bitbucket doing these days?
Sourceforge???
I am pretty sure they were talking about sourcehut...
I was yes, I must have been more tired than I realized.
AtomGit
>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.
> 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.
> This is a very HN take.
It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.
I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.
Microsoft even admits they lost gaming, because their objective is now to catch Windows up to SteamOS - which, to remind anyone, is a Linux distro that runs a Windows emulator: https://bsky.app/profile/brunodias.bsky.social/post/3mkniszk...
yes, Wine is an emulator
> yes, Wine is an emulator
I think it's more accurate to say that Wine contains some components that are emulators, not that it is an emulator. Sure, it has to emulate the x86 MMU's segmentation behavior, because Linux doesn't set it up the same way. It has to emulate x86 interrupt & CPU exception delivery, because Windows delivers those to applications in a different way than Linux does. For some very old programs, it has to emulate I/O ports and some device behavior. I think GDI and DirectDraw require emulation of a framebuffer and palette hardware.
But the vast majority of Wine's code is not emulation; most of it is a clean-room reimplementation of the win32 APIs, a PE/COFF loader, Windows registry, etc. All of those parts are implementations of API contracts and binary format parsers, not emulation, in the same way that GNUstep is a reimplementation of NeXTSTEP/Cocoa, and not an emulator. (The main difference being that Wine can run Windows executables unmodified, whereas GNUstep expects you to recompile/relink from source. That is a sizeable difference, but not an emulator-sized difference.)
And yes, the computer science definition of "emulator" doesn't specify hardware: it's simply a system that reproduces the externally observable behavior of another system. But if we follow that definition too closely, then things that are clearly not emulators become emulators. Like musl and glibc are emulators of the C standard library (or of each other?), Android is an emulator of the Java virtual machine, and Mesa's software renderer is an emulator of OpenGL or a GPU (that latter bit is tempting, but it really isn't a GPU emulator). At this level, "emulator" just means "abstraction layer", which makes it pretty useless as a term if we take it that far.
So I think "WINE Is Not an Emulator" is true. It contains some bits that are absolutely emulators, but it is not, in its entirety, an emulator, and emulating isn't the function of the bulk of its code.
(I'm not trying to be pedantic here; this was actually a fun thought exercise about emulation in general and Wine in particular.)
> 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.
There won't be any.
I'm old enough to remember this happening: 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.
Yes, but this time there’s the additional driving force of countries trying to become more self reliant and not get locked into US software giants (France and Germany for example). A long way to go, but it’s gaining more traction than the past half-assed attempts.
FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.
Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.
As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.
It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.
> and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science
What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?
They're referring to the Windows kernel; see the preceding paragraph on the Windows kernel - the three general purpose OS families are Linux, macOS, Windows.
Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.
Last years Crowdstrike outage never hit any of the macOS computers with CS installed because on macOS the Crowdstrike agent runs entirely in userspace thanks to the Endpoint Security framework.
Really the security of macOS is probably the best of all of the desktop OSes, and as annoying as it can be.
Can you think of any downsides to the approach of forcing secure boot on all users for security?
You should state your take instead of inviting me to speculate about what it is.
People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.
And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.
Is this even an issue these days ? I thought GSuite was good enough for most office work for a very long time now ?
I'd say that for the majority of old-school, established, non-tech organizations (oil, steel, manufacturing, governments, etc), it's not only an issue but it's the de-facto standard, along with Exchange, ActiveDirectory and all the nice things that come with it.
> you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids
You think? They're still pushing the "native" Minecraft that isn't scriptable aren't they? And maintaining the fully moddable java MC against their will.
I know there is a complicated history here as well but I personally find VS Code pretty satisfactory for my needs and really appreciate that it's free.
Not sure if that balances out the burning fire of hate I feel for Microsoft Office but it's something.
First time I've heard Redmond used as a metonym for Microsoft
20-25 years ago it was fairly common, and it never stopped, just faded gradually.
Nope. I think all this is mostly virtue signaling and a bit of "GitHub derangement syndrome" in the water.
People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.
MH had a weird ass set of Tweets a month or so ago talking about GitHub needing disruption and how the UI was bad. Now it's "Not fun anymore".
I guess you die a hero or live long enough to be irrelevant and shouting at clouds like Stallman.
Work at a company on GH Enterprise. Outside those recent major incidents and a few spots here and there we haven't even noticed issues. It NEVER comes up on engineering or leadership meetings as an issue or risk. Not a single time has GitHubs issues come up as an agenda item. Yeah, YMMV but still...
> People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.
The writer of this blog post is Mitchell Hashimoto, and he has posted positively about AI, so that doesn't track at all.
The reason people are talking about it is because the decline is rapid. That's worse than the raw downtime. There's a sense that it will be even worse in a year.
I'm not a fan of AI everywhere but I have 0 reason to think this is from AI usage at Microsoft. Still, we talk about the issues a lot. We used to do our project management in GitHub. For whatever reason, projects don't work anymore. You can add an issue to a project and it won't show up. So we moved that part off of GitHub. That's too bad, I liked linking to issues.
If this happens enough, the only thing left will be hosting code, and we'll look at each other and go "we can do this anywhere"
It's contagious negativity.
I didn't even know people were complaining about it until today, I was speaking to our company's personal issues with Github the last few months.
Do you have anything to contribute other than "everyone is irrational but me?"
> To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.
A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.
Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
git-bug is great but it doesn't handle PRs nor does it have a method for users without commit rights to submit bugs to the project. I know they're working on the latter (something with the web UI?) but until then you still need some kind of public infra for issue management if you want the general public to be able to submit issues.
I use it for my project[0] to keep issues centralized with the repo, but I still use Github Discussions as a pseudo-bug tracker to let random users provide input. If it's a bug I add it to git-bug and sync it to Github issues for public viewing[1], but if you want use bug reports that's not really going to work.
[0] https://github.com/stryan/materia
[1] Ironically I got this workflow idea from ghostty and mise, both of which require users to submit bug reports as discussions first and only generate tagged issues once an actionable bug is determined.
For me the main issue with git-bug is that they are not dogfooding it. However, it's also one of the few projects that is actually trying to solve the core problem, rather than skirting around it. (well I now learned of radicle in this thread and they seem to store issues in git and even have PR support I think)
> For me the main issue with git-bug is that they are not dogfooding it.
This is incorrect.
See the related issue for more info: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/issues/1221#issuecomment-...That said, yes, GitHub is still our source of truth, as our web application does not currently support "guest" access, and there are other platform features that our community uses that we do not currently have support for (e.g. discussions and pull requests). Big changes to the web ui are coming soon, which will help to unlock the ability to do these things.
I've also been in talks with the Radicle team about possible collaboration.
Oh cool! I've come across git-bug a while ago, glad to see you're using it.
I didn't know git-bug doesn't support PRs yet. I think pull requests should be modeled as a kind of issue. It's an issue with some metadata that points to a commit (and besides the usual issue operations like add new comment or edit a comment, you also have the operation of editing the commit associated with the PR)
If git-bug gains suppport for Github discussions, it should also be able to import discussions from other places like a discourse forum. I think it would be kinda neat for projects that want to be self contained
> I've also been in talks with the Radicle team about possible collaboration.
This is awesome!!
Glad to hear about the web UI changes, git-bug has been really great for my projects that exist across forges so I look forward to testing it out :)
Thanks for the kind words!
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.
https://radicle.dev/
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?
yes, they're stored in git itself. See https://radicle.dev/guides/protocol#collaborative-objects
The most important part of Linus' project was day -1, when he sliced off all the chunks of work that depend on solving open research problems.
You don't want to start your Saturday morning declaring an _action struct, then filling the rest of the day staring at research papers about the current state of fast homomorphic encryption.
Check out Epiq https://github.com/ljtn/epiq
It was born out of frustration and does just that. It is about to go v1 within days.
It was 10 days, but that's fine too.
There is also epiq, which is a bit more bleeding edge but has a more powerful UI story, being a TUI app, providing an issue board in the terminal:
https://github.com/ljtn/epiq
Oh that's interesting!
Does it have bidirectional tracking with Github? (if I create or comment on an issue in Github it will be reflected on epiq, and if I create on epiq, some bot will post it to Github). For me this is the key feature.
Also
> The system is designed to assure robustness and uses a number of techniques and design patterns to avoid merge conflicts.
I think the docs should describe this in detail.
Anyway maybe ask him to post this to HN some day!
Hey! Creator of Epiq here. Epiq is platform agnostic mening that it is doing its own thing and does not connect to github issues. Epiq maintains its own board definition as an immutable (append only) event log, which is synchronized using git.
An integration layer with github issues or other platforms is definitely not unthinkable.
V1 is about to be released in the coming days.
> I think the docs should describe this in detail.
Thanks for the feedback. I will add a section about that in the readme!
[EDIT] - readme updated with section about event sourcing strategy
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).
It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo.
Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.
Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)
It's definitely time to turn these loose web features into a real program. I don't understand the desire to clone github as a website. It's demonstrably 10,000x more work to maintain github.com than a "github" command.
Even if you only used raw git with GitHub, it still wouldn't work. Pushing changes from my laptop would fail for hours when their SSO would break.
I didn't know of this, that special ref mechanism sounds really cool! Thanks for the protip
We've had trouble with git and repo's that have used non standard refs. It's all fine and fancy until we wanted to use some tooling that works with git, except it wouldn't see our unusual refs, and because they were non standard they were effectively hidden unless you knew they were there. So the migration work (almost) silently lost 10+ years of old work that was hiding away under those non standard refs.
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.
[flagged]
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.
Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
GitHub claims that AI development tools have caused a massive surge in demand in recent months. They need to scale by 30X to keep up with demand.
According to GitHub, Azure migration is the attempt at a fix/upscaling, not the underlying cause of the issues.
Addressing GitHub’s recent availability issues: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...
An update on GitHub availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
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.
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).
> 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
They said they're designing for a future that would require 30X of today's scale.
They did not say that they need to scale 30X to meet today's demand.
To be fair, the "demand is up 30X" claim was spammed all over social media so it's easy to see why this topic is so misunderstood
Funny how windows updates are never postponed for lack of "scaling". I know, I know, completely different stuff here - but arent test vms and ci vms being updated constantly?
Im old enough to remember the hotmail migration to win2k (then 2k3) and the postmortem. I was also old enough to look at the rotor source code. Yah, that one, running managed code in freebsd.
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.
What would you suggest they do to reduce demand? (This is a serious question btw)
They could make people pay for stuff that is free right now.
And yet: GitHub is also getting called greedy and horrible for moving to usage based billing:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923357
If demand increased that much they should be imposing rate limits.
Then they shouldn't be encouraging AI development tool usage.
I've never pushed a commit and thought huh, I wonder what copilot thinks of this.
Coupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github's abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
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.
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.
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.
I'd add a third point: record service usage.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
We don't have a labeled y-axis so their record usage could be a 5% increase for all they're showing us.
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.
This isn't 1998 anymore.
Were we better at labeling axes in 1998? Sounds plausible, but who knows.
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.
And yet GitHub has felt the most dead it ever did. Less quality contributions. Less feeling of community. All the open source projects are struggling.
They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive
Is it September already?
Wake me up when...
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.
> if those graphs are even vaguely accurate
They aren't, of course. The Y axis is missing. GitHub didn't have 0 daily commits at the start of 2023.
https://handsondataviz.org/how-to-lie-with-charts.html#exagg...
No, but commits are growing 14x YoY: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
Not even vibe coders, but autonomous agents/bots.
I‘ve noticed that some projects have „Claude“ as one of their top three contributors.
Claude code co-authors commits, that might account
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.
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.
It started being bad after MS.
It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI
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.
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
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.
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.
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
2. GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code: 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-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.co...
https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
I'm curious if your graph had the number of projects its hosting shown as well?
#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.
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
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.
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.
Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have
Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?
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).
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?
[dead]
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/
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.
tangled.org writes issues as atproto data that lives in a user's PDS which is one neat idea.
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.
Interestingly ATProto uses Merkle Search Trees to store data as commits, so in some respects it is similar to git. It even signs each commit (say you post an issue record to your ATProto personal data server) it is inserted into your merkle search tree based on content and id hashing rules, and then the new root node in the tree is signed so you can verify its integrity.
Now there is absolutely a benefit to co-locating issues and PRs with your code in the same git repo. In a way it becomes much simpler to move your entire repository and all activity when everything is in the same .git folder.
With Tangled your code is stored in your code repository and issues and PRs in your data repository. On the other hand the ATProto stuff is what means your project becomes discoverable and that other users in the network automatically can interact with your repository (likes, issues, etc).
> 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/
The arrogance of anybody, let alone a designer, thinking they could build something better than the foundations of software (and the modern world itself) is crazy.
I love it, but you have to deliver or else I will mock you :P
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.
Great! I'll take my money to someone else who can handle the current state of engineering instead of wasting it trying to predict the future.
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.
I’m Maggie and I’m a staff research engineer at GitHub Next. At least that’s my title, but I’m actually a designer. Or I was, back when that was still a separate thing to engineering.
Ah. I didn't think we could debase the title of "engineer" any further, and yet here we are.
> I sit at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development
How do these people still have jobs post ZIRP?
[flagged]
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?
“Few years ago” is about a decade in design, to be fair.
I’m not sure what staff level means at GitHub, but at some other companies it’s just “senior++”, and people with 10yoe get that title quite often.
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.
The state of HN truly has fallen if people are questioning Maggie Appleton's credentials. Besides, she's working on GitHub Next, not the core product. Sheesh.
What credentials related to software engineering? Please expand and do not post nebulous comments like these.
I'm aware of who this person is, been following their work since their egghead.io doodle days. What I would never do is put this person in a position involving software research when they were never professionally a software developer nor were they academically trained like one either.
I'm sorry but this is just a perfect encapsulation of why American corporations are brazenly bad and corrupt without actual competition.
This is honestly no different than RFK Jr being the Secretary of HHS. I'm sure if you spoke with him, he'd say he was highly competent at this job too.
Idk. If I learned that the head of design for Github worked as a linux contributor and C developer before taking on that role I would have a similar reaction.
By credentials you mean, and I mean no offence, that she is an established artist and has a great personal website?
She is internet famous, sure, but she still has to prove if her ideas on how to evolve GitHub are the right one.
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.
GitLab? We use gitlab for work. Its way worse in comparison.
Last week I encountered a bug where my merge request simply didn't show that I deleted a file. Apparently it's because my MR included the creation of a folder with the same name as the basename of the deleted file. Unacceptable for a code hosting platform.
Other than that I miss GH Actions, a clear ui (gitlab has way too many sub-menus), a responsive ui (gitlab feels very sluggish). And while we don't have the Gitlab duo activated, it still pops out regularly eventhough I can't use it besides closing it. ...and I don't even want to start with their issue buard.
It strongly reminds me of Jira in terms of quality, which is no compliment.
At least it isn't Bitbucket.
I think Atlassian and Microsoft are genuinely in a competition to see who can make worse software and still have customers.
At this point maybe even Azure DevOps is an improvement
I haven't used it in about 3 years; but 3 years ago it was not at all
As someone whose employer uses both: nope, not yet
I mean at least the pipelines almost always seem to work...
What issues do you have with bitbucket?
Gitlab is written in Ruby on Rails. Don‘t expect to much from it.
Would love to see it become more common for projects with sufficient inertia to host their own forge like GNOME or Inkscape do. Could be a service that foundations like CNCF or LF offer to their projects.
Eh, I kinda hope not. Codeberg's latency even for just browsing is pretty bad (in my experience) and also is only sporting a single 9 of uptime [1].
I wish Codeberg the best, but I thought it was a questionable choice for Zig and feel similarly for Ghostty—doesn't seem like a strict improvement.
[1] https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg
Well, that page took 13 seconds to load for me :/
Could just be the status page software itself. It looks like it uses https://github.com/louislam/redbean-node which is kind of cursed
> This automatically generates the tables and columns... on-the-fly. It infers relations based on naming conventions.
Tbf its free software and the quality will go up the more people are using it and contributing.
I haven’t really found that free services scale the same way. It’s hard for the “open source community” to contribute and improve the quality of bottlenecks that are only encountered by one operator.
When you take OSS projects that scale well, say Linux, Postgres, Kafka, redis, etc. they either scale up (Linux) which is arguable easier, or were able to scale out because there are thousands, if not millions, that have massive deployments pushing them to their limits.
Unless there is some sort of secure way to “open source” operational data for codeberg, or many others running huge deployments of Forgejo I don’t see it being very effective.
I do see Google having another go at code hosting though.
I'm not only talking about engineering contributions, but also about monetary contributions
Oh that’s even more hopeless
Same here. I'm mildly optimistic tangled will go somewhere and be a viable replacement
> 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)?
As in, to present themselves as the new defacto git host, capitalizing on GitHub's actual + perceived lack of reliability
No, I understood that.
How? I want to partake in the thought exercise.
What more could/should GitLab, for example, be doing to capitalize?
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.
Perhaps humanizing posts like this:
https://blog.tangled.org/federation
Maybe Ghostty will follow Zig to Codeberg, but it doesn't seem like a fit to me.
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.
I'm also closely following Tangled's development. Their two biggest weak points: lack of private repositories and ux design (which I don't have a problem with but I've seen many people mention) are both being worked on. Atproto is developing a permissioned data segment to the protocol, and Tangled just hired a designer. I'm excited for it.
>manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute
For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.
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.
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.
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.
This seems like a great opportunity for new platforms who are rethinking the OSS space to finally gain the traction they need to be effective. For a collaborative platform, quantity is key, and I am hopeful that someone who is interested in advancing the software space will become the new go-to. This isn't to say that GitHub hasn't been innovating, but at least from my perspective, the way we've used git for the past however-many-years has remained basically constant.
Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
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.
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.
Yep. I cannot imagine any universe where I'd rather use GitHub Actions than a shell script.
Thanks for the callout: we’ve been reimagining code forges by making them irrelevant with tools and tiny services like: https://pgit.pico.sh (static site generator for git) and https://pr.pico.sh (pastebin for git collab)
They are still a WIP but it’s on our roadmap to continue to improve.
Tried tangled, quite like the idea! The fact you can always switch to a self-hosted knot is nice.
I was looking to self-host forgejo but I didn't want to expose any SSH, and needing to be on a tailscale network just to develop also seemed flakey.
I'll stay on codeberg for now and check out tangled from time to time, because I think this is a good use of ATProto
I’d love see Tangled succeed because it strikes a good balance of UX and features. Sadly, there’s no clear pricing story around managed solution. They are also VC funded so they can follow the “journey of VC backed org” anytime.
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 :))
> 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.
I find the alternatives more likely to ban/censor than X. Bluesky is definitely not civil to those with the "wrong" opinions, despite what proponents of the service say.
It's not about the technology, it's about the people. The initial people on your network matter. The moderators matter too. That's just a very different job than writing and shipping code.
I see your point, but the last few (services) that tried seemed to have become even worse?
he's not one of its "biggest, most prolific users"
moving away from X would just result in less visibility
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
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).
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.
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?
Lots of the users are bad, but the owner specifically tweaks and changes the algorithm to suit his own agenda and push his stance. That's what makes it an unserious platform.
> And also, there's some alternate microblogging site that is less hostile to truth and civility? Which site is that?
Mastodon, by definition. Any hostile instance can be left for a better one.
Hey! One of the maintainers of Radicle (https://radicle.dev/) here
If you have the time, it would be great to see you trying out Radicle, even if it’s just for a mirror to start; then see how we can turn that into something more integrated!
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.
Is GitLab pretty good these days?
I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.
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.
Also written in golang so much faster using fewer resources.
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.)
I had steered away for a long while thinking it was subpar to GitHub, but it's really come a long way. Especially running it on a local network it's noticeably faster in every way than GitHub, and I'm able to build complex gitlab workflows with custom runners that are fully configurable and have effectively 100% uptime and no queues.
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.
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)
Eh, it wasn't about the stack, it was the features over quality track they were taking for a few years there where what features they had were impressive (they really motivated GitHub to get off its butt and do some things) but there were plenty of experience and reliability problems.
I just mean running it yourself comes with that heavy stack caveat. As far as a platform goes, it's a pretty comprehensive system.
i am opposed to using anything which is not single binary and not using a sqlite db for self hosted things which don't need to scale to millions of users.
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
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
Founder of WarpBuild here: we provide faster runners (also cheaper), and have some niceties around debugging workflows like ssh-ing into them, observability etc.
Thank You, great product. Do you have something for merge queues?
re: #1, Blacksmith (https://blacksmith.sh) exists and it works pretty well!
Yes, I pay for blacksmith rn. Thank You for your response though.
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...
Luke Wroblewski posted this earlier today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukew_small-taste-of-the-inco...
The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.
There's no Y axis. It doesn't mean anything. There could be a 10% difference since 2023 for all we know.
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.
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.
Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub:
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
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.
Being pragmatic means admitting AI is unstoppable whether you like it or not. Stopping copilot BS doesn't conflict with that
AI should not even be part of this discussion, it’s frankly irrelevant. None of the complaints Mitchell or anyone else has would be fixed by deleting Copilot or adding new agentic features. Deliver a stable and secure development platform first, then do AI stuff.
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?
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.
> Copilot revenue goes to 0 if GitHub burns to the ground.
That's not remotely true. I doubt most Copilot Business/Enterprise subscribers care about GitHub at all.
Inbe4 he will move to some agentic git product from vercel
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?
> 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.
It was four years ago that GitHub had major enough outages with their database that they had to issue a press release (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...). Five months ago I was actually still recommending GitHub. Then a month ago I left the platform, because I couldn't get shit done anymore.
The alternatives aren't great. If any VCs wanna send a couple hundred grand my way, I'd be willing to start a GitHub alternative, if only so I could have a not-crappy place to host my own repos.
We did raise $4.5M recently to build exactly this: https://tangled.org
edit if any VCs wanna give me millions of dollars to start a GitHub alternative, I might be willing to maybe consider it possibly
https://disroot.org/ provides Git hosting (and email, cloud storage, and more). Their annual revenue is about $35k. There's no money in this.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yes.
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
94 incidents in 90 days.
It's not always you see a status page so colorful...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
> 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.
Upvoted for the username
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
I didn’t read this as a flex. More a rueful admission of his connection/addiction to GitHub.
I saw it as a sad combination of the two.
The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition
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.
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.
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.
Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
2026 - when you have to specify which catastrophic outage was the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted your migration.
> 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).
What does Gitlab need to do to be that competition?
It needs to have fewer features and cost more money.
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
Excited to see what Graphite is cooking: https://x.com/MerrillLutsky/status/2049231503108780405
I wonder if radicle.xyz will start taking off, as there is no corporate entity hanging over its head, and never likely will be.
Meta-observation: GitHub's quality is so bad that Mitchell has to clarify in his writeup which recent outage he is talking about!!!
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.
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.
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
As long as GitHub Actions is free for Open Source, I'll keep using it. There's nothing comparable for free yet.
Of course Github using now Azure as a testbed is problematic. Since Azure is mismanaged and doomed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 the problem will either be fixed or we all have to leave. I think they hired cheap staff to manually fix overprovisioned Azure boxes on demand. Maybe the morons at Azure will come to their senses one day, or not.
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 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.
....of course less than 24 hours later I stumble across https://radicle.dev/ completely by accident. It's been in the works for years.
Well played, universe.
>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.
> 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
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.
GitHub needs a Sonos moment, after they launched their failed new app that made everyone angry and leave they got a new person in and I've seen them actively respond to issues on BlueSky with honest responses and not corporate fluff ever since while also turning the ship around.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...
Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.
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
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.
Teams has introduced substantial improvements over the past couple years..
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!!!
Ah yes, ... Yes?
Github is moving to Azure.
https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173
Might explain at least a part of the issues.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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).
I wonder if this is related to the pretty serious security incident about Github which got published today:
https://x.com/sagitz_/status/2049153195243372569
With malicious HTTP headers, any user could access any repo on Github.com, or on the Enterprise Github instance they might have access to. It's even worse than that because it's remote code execution on the Github server.
It seems like Github has been a mess since the Microsoft acquisition. Definitely feels like another multi billion dollar screwup in the making, like Skype or Nokia were.
Hopefully the incidents in the last few weeks are a wakeup call, and they start getting their shit together.
> 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.
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.
GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
This is assigning an unearned malicious competence to Microsoft
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
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?
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.
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.
From FreeBSD to Windows 2000: Microsoft’s Painful Hotmail Migration
https://archive.md/KZ0sy
GitHub literally getting ghosted
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Why is it a no-no? Arent FOSS projects like Gadgetbridge or Forgejo itself using their PR system?
It's just a PITA to contribute, compared to platforms with wider adoption like github/gitlab.
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..
We have both GHE as well as GH.com - and, i genuinely couldn't tell you which of the two blows up more often.
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.
git is worker owned - unless the worker chooses to outsource its ownership
git is not a company, you're thinking of Github. Classic mistake.
GitHub is not worker owned. git is.
You can't be a worker owned company if you're not a company.
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.
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.
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.
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).
A remnant of the old GitHub still remains, try surfing to a non-existing repositor like https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOf...
(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)
> 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
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?
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
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.
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?
Because he wants to move it and then has to provide rationale behind why Ghostty is moving away from Github.
Why share any opinion ever?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives
There's probably a few more to be added there now.
Check your PRs - some major options missing!
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
Do not forget: "Embrace AI or get out!"
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
Thomas Dohmke is out. Probably he did not embrace AI enough. He is now working for several companies as advisor and board member.
Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833
https://api.github.com/users/<username>
Thanks mkw5053
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Github is fine, but it's getting costly for private repo owners, especially Rust developers. Compilation takes forever, action time runs out quickly.
>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.
I read this and felt like I was reading a moltbook post.
Am I an agent? Are you?
Is Claude... God?
I predict that if any other platform can challenge github to the point where it has let's say 1/10 of the users, pushes, workflows etc. that github has today, we'll start seeing outages and bugs there too.
Individual forges might support a few thousand users if set up professionally; codeberg etc. might give you an order or two of magnitude more. Gitlab has something like 50M users [1] but it's unclear whether that includes self-hosting, I suspect it does.
Github hit 100M users in 2023 [2] and will hit double that before long if trends continue - the figure of 180M is quoted in different places like [3] for the end of 2025.
From the same page: "Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute, merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month (+23% YoY), and pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY)—including a record of nearly 100 million in August alone."
At that scale, it's a miracle anything works at all to be honest, and suggests that Microsoft probably _is_ throwing some love, money, and some of the best developers at it just so the thing stays up even some of the time while they're hitting exponential growth.
The current situation sucks, but it's not evidence that Microsoft is being deliberately evil.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/ [2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-d... [3] https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...
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
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).
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.
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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.
Related:
An Update on GitHub Availability
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422
's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018
Mitchell is a bellwether.
This is a 'tipping point' situation. Exodus will be a little at a time, then all at once.
This was good for me to read. I'm still on GitHub, but think about moving more frequently than I'd like to
An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?
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
> 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.
If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.
Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.
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.
We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.
Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.
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
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.
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.
github failure is a live lesson of dysfunctional org. A business unit like github need a CEO.
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.
All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.
One of the issues is that Github competes with Azure Devops, and MS prefers to push Azure.
Anytime Microsoft buys something it's time to start looking for alternatives
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.
Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?
The question is where do you go?
Is there anything less important than the origin URL of a Git repository?
Best alternative list anyone?
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!
Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
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.
You should be CEO of github or make your own git hub.
I didn't get it. Why are they leaving GitHub?
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."
i empathize with the folks running a largely free service who are being spammed by bots and built everything around some other assumptions
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.
Microsoft truly is the reverse King Midas!
just use https://onedev.io/ !
best dev platform
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.
I remember sourceforge, not as good.
pack it up. we're going to codeberg.
I could recommend trying out source hut!
What I want to see is Linux kernel leaving GitHub...Always had a bad feeling about it being hosted at somewhere controlled by Microsoft..
Linux kernel source is hosted at https://kernel.org , not GitHub. You're probably thinking of Linus Torvald's read-only mirror[1].
[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux
Thanks for the correction.
I reiterate gitlab > github
github is very disappionted for me, copilot usage changing is awful
gh been going down hill since microslop took over. No surprise.
> 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)
> (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
I’m aware, I was one of the people who commented on that thread!
I'm sensing a trend
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.
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.
Github was not built for a world where its userbase quadrupled and are pumping in generated slop at non-stop pace.
So not their problem.
Is their problem, but have some grace. You wouldn't be able to handle this insane growth either.
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.
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.
Imagine a world where Google had bought GitHub instead of Microsoft.
they would have shut it down after 5 years
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.
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.
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.
Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!
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.
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..
I doom scroll GitHub issues too. :( I'm so addicted to open source hahahahah.
I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...
<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>
Bro was treating github like social media
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I blame Agent Smith
- Mr. Anderson
enshittification, as usual
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.
Push your AI code on GitSlop, nowa available on gitslop.com.
Missed a perfect opportunity to call Copilot Slopilot.
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tldr: chronic outages, near-daily github actions failures blocking real work
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GitHub is fine.
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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.
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.