Hacker News

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.

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'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 !

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

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.

> 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.

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).

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!

> 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 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.

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.

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.

> 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

> 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 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?

I thought you like worked there but with the additional context that you never did, yeah cringe

> 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 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.

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 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.

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'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.

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'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 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.

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.

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.

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.

"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

Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)

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.

chill dude

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.

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.

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.

> 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

Dude, get some help

You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.

What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?

God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.

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."

hug

Thank you for your hard work.

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.

> 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.

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

Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?

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.

Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.

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.

> 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.

Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?

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.

the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.

"They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day.

https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25

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 :(.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

literally zero nines of uptime lmao, do they win an award?

> 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.

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 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

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.

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.

This is fantasticly poetic!

Are you… explaining the effects of being acquired to Hashimoto?

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.

> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO

And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.

Maybe it's time for fossil to get another look... It's effectively distributed code, wiki, and issues all using the same tool.

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.

Gitlab is pretty cool to be honest, and it’s generally underrated.

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'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 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".

> 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.

First time I've heard Redmond used as a metonym for Microsoft

> 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.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.)

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

Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I've heard. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

I'd add a third point: record service usage.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

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 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

#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.

https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

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.

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?

That sounds like somebody have a psychological break TBH.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Same here. I'm mildly optimistic tangled will go somewhere and be a viable replacement

Maybe Ghostty will follow Zig to Codeberg, but it doesn't seem like a fit to me.

> 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)?

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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 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.

Is GitLab pretty good these days?

I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.

Founder of WarpBuild here: we provide faster runners (also cheaper), and have some niceties around debugging workflows like ssh-ing into them, observability etc.

re: #1, Blacksmith (https://blacksmith.sh) exists and it works pretty well!

> 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.

We did raise $4.5M recently to build exactly this: https://tangled.org

https://disroot.org/ provides Git hosting (and email, cloud storage, and more). Their annual revenue is about $35k. There's no money in this.

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.

https://xcancel.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168

> 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

Yes.

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

94 incidents in 90 days.

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

There's no Y axis. It doesn't mean anything. There could be a 10% difference since 2023 for all we know.

2026 - when you have to specify which catastrophic outage was the straw that broke the camel's back and prompted your migration.

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.

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 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.

Why is it a no-no? Arent FOSS projects like Gadgetbridge or Forgejo itself using their PR system?

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?

We have both GHE as well as GH.com - and, i genuinely couldn't tell you which of the two blows up more often.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

This is assigning an unearned malicious competence to Microsoft

[flagged]

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.

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.

Thanks mkw5053

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

What does Gitlab need to do to be that competition?

> (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

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.

Teams has introduced substantial improvements over the past couple years..

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.

So not their problem.

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.