by mitchellh
73 subcomments
- 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 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/
by JuniperMesos
6 subcomments
- 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.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai
2 subcomments
- 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.
- >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.
by nextaccountic
7 subcomments
- > 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)
by ffaser5gxlsll
0 subcomment
- 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...
- 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.
by _doctor_love
1 subcomments
- 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 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.
- I wonder if radicle.xyz will start taking off, as there is no corporate entity hanging over its head, and never likely will be.
by infogulch
2 subcomments
- 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/
by hmokiguess
5 subcomments
- > 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/
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
by incognito124
1 subcomments
- 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 :))
by featherless
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
by ianberdin
1 subcomments
- 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.
by vadepaysa
2 subcomments
- 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
by 0xbadcafebee
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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?
by tabs_or_spaces
0 subcomment
- > 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
by throwatdem12311
1 subcomments
- 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”. 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.
by theYipster
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by tempestnick
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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
by chrisweekly
1 subcomments
- 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.
by dueyfinster
0 subcomment
- 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
by tracerbulletx
0 subcomment
- 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.
by WadeGrimridge
3 subcomments
- Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub:
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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)
- 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).
- Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives
There's probably a few more to be added there now.
- 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.
- The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition
by aussieguy1234
0 subcomment
- 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
by pull_my_finger
0 subcomment
- 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.
by crowdhailer
0 subcomment
- This was good for me to read. I'm still on GitHub, but think about moving more frequently than I'd like to
- 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...
by wartywhoa23
0 subcomment
- 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.
by underdeserver
1 subcomments
- Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
by _doctor_love
0 subcomment
- Meta-observation: GitHub's quality is so bad that Mitchell has to clarify in his writeup which recent outage he is talking about!!!
by BigTTYGothGF
2 subcomments
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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’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.
- 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?
- 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!
by basilikum
1 subcomments
- 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.
by abc123abc123
0 subcomment
- 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.
by farfatched
0 subcomment
- 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?
- 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.
- From FreeBSD to Windows 2000: Microsoft’s Painful Hotmail Migration
https://archive.md/KZ0sy
- github failure is a live lesson of dysfunctional org. A business unit like github need a CEO.
by SupLockDef
0 subcomment
- Do not forget: "Embrace AI or get out!"
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
by mikeputnam
0 subcomment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
by funkaster
1 subcomments
- 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.
- > 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 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.
- 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 read this and felt like I was reading a moltbook post.
Am I an agent? Are you?
Is Claude... God?
by cartofupai
0 subcomment
- Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.
- Is there anything less important than the origin URL of a Git repository?
by samtrack2019
1 subcomments
- 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..
- GitHub literally getting ghosted
by edward_huazai
0 subcomment
- github is very disappionted for me, copilot usage changing is awful
- 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).
by QuiCasseRien
0 subcomment
- just use https://onedev.io/ !
best dev platform
- 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.
- Microsoft truly is the reverse King Midas!
by aforwardslash
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by contact9879
2 subcomments
- 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
- One of the issues is that Github competes with Azure Devops, and MS prefers to push Azure.
- 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.
- Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833
https://api.github.com/users/<username>
- 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.
by hmokiguess
1 subcomments
- GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.
- 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".
by sholladay
1 subcomments
- 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.
- An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?
- 's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018
- 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.
by butterlesstoast
0 subcomment
- > 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.
- We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.
by ElenaDaibunny
0 subcomment
- 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.
by muragekibicho
2 subcomments
- 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
- 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).
- Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.
- "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.
by aykutseker
0 subcomment
- 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.
- The question is where do you go?
- Best alternative list anyone?
- 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."
by mixmastamyk
0 subcomment
- 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.
- Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
- i empathize with the folks running a largely free service who are being spammed by bots and built everything around some other assumptions
by darkteflon
0 subcomment
- 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.
- pack it up. we're going to codeberg.
- What I want to see is Linux kernel leaving GitHub...Always had a bad feeling about it being hosted at somewhere controlled by Microsoft..
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- > 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).
- 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.
- Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.
- 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.
by velcrovan
1 subcomments
- > 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)
- 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...
- I reiterate gitlab > github
by AlienRobot
0 subcomment
- >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.
- Bro was treating github like social media
by throwawaypath
0 subcomment
- Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!
- 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.
by gyoridavid
0 subcomment
- <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>
- 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 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.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- Related:
An Update on GitHub Availability
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422
by krainboltgreene
0 subcomment
- 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.
- I could recommend trying out source hut!
- 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.
- All of this and more entered my mind the very moment I learned that Microsoft had acquired GitHub.
by josefritzishere
0 subcomment
- I'm sensing a trend
by cmrdporcupine
1 subcomments
- 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.
- gh been going down hill since microslop took over. No surprise.
- enshittification, as usual
by sergiotapia
2 subcomments
- Github was not built for a world where its userbase quadrupled and are pumping in generated slop at non-stop pace.
by Peaches4Rent
0 subcomment
- I blame Agent Smith
- Mr. Anderson
- [flagged]
by flowdesktech
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by joeblogsmomma
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by immanuwell
0 subcomment
- tldr: chronic outages, near-daily github actions failures blocking real work
by coolThingsFirst
0 subcomment
- [flagged]
by selectively
0 subcomment
- GitHub is fine.
by nickdothutton
1 subcomments
- 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.
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