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

They have a visual-only captcha on signup with a (extremely-badly-documented and non-obvious) workaround for accessibility, and that workaround doesn't work if you build Codeberg from source. If you look at the commit history, the frontend changes for the workaround are still there (tucked away in an unassuming refactoring commit), the backend check... isn't.

This is the one undocumented change we can clearly detect, God only knows how many more there are. For such a self-described champion of open source, such behavior should be considered unacceptable.

I'm deliberately not describing the workaround here, I suppose that the reason it's so well hidden is to prevent spammers from abusing it. As it is currently the only way to sign up for a Codeberg account with a screen reader, no matter how ineffective for most people, I'm hesitant to post more details here. All I'm going to say is that it can be found if you carefully look at the frontend code of the signup form.

I've tried reaching out to Codeberg about this (had a DM conversation on Mastodon with one of the members, but there was no further response.

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."

We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.

best dev platform

Too negligible a problem. Service outages are much more important issues, and much less controversial.

They've started shipping stuff again, but it's mostly not stuff I want.

Great footnote to finish the article.

Am I an agent? Are you?

Is Claude... God?

What a timeline that would be. One can dream.

Individual forges might support a few thousand users if set up professionally; codeberg etc. might give you an order or two of magnitude more. Gitlab has something like 50M users [1] but it's unclear whether that includes self-hosting, I suspect it does.

Github hit 100M users in 2023 [2] and will hit double that before long if trends continue - the figure of 180M is quoted in different places like [3] for the end of 2025.

From the same page: "Developers created more than 230 new repositories every minute, merged 43.2 million pull requests on average each month (+23% YoY), and pushed nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (+25.1% YoY)—including a record of nearly 100 million in August alone."

At that scale, it's a miracle anything works at all to be honest, and suggests that Microsoft probably _is_ throwing some love, money, and some of the best developers at it just so the thing stays up even some of the time while they're hitting exponential growth.

The current situation sucks, but it's not evidence that Microsoft is being deliberately evil.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/ [2] https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/100-million-d... [3] https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-a-new-...

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).

An Update on GitHub Availability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422

>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

This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.

This is a 'tipping point' situation. Exodus will be a little at a time, then all at once.

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

https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...

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.

The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.

I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!

codeberg, self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, still-beta sourcehut, tangled? github was “the git community” and now it’s fracturing—you need accounts everywhere, you can’t easily discover neat projects

i like tangled if only because it’s built on atproto which emphasizes ownership and transferability of identity: something that would make the move off github so much easier

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

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?

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.

https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45517173

Might explain at least a part of the issues.

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.

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).

I don’t mind the lower availability to be honest but I also noticed it.

To be fair I don’t add new code on GitHub for my own private projects anymore. Public projects of course profit from the network effect but there must be a better way. Before GitHub people also did well, Linux, many well known GNU projects etc. were created without GitHub.

https://archive.md/KZ0sy

Had they remained independent I have no doubt it'd be a very different story.

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)

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.

If it’s free - you are the product.

fwiw - i do keep a fair amount of code in my computer. i don't push everything..

I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...

- Mr. Anderson

Mitchell said on X if he was in charge, he would shut down copilot completely. It might bring in revenue but without core GitHub, Copilot also goes to zero and he’s totally right about this.

It makes absolutely no sense for Microslop to have Copilot when they have such a huge stake in OpenAI and they have Codex. The price hikes for copilot tokens and the massive backlash proves this is not a good business model. Just shut it down and get back to fundamentals.

AI is a cancer and it slowly hollows out everything it touches. Corporate greed is merely an accelerant.

You might say “it’s merely a tool”, but it’s impossible for me to divorce the realities of the terrible harm these generative AI tools are doing to the world and it’s immensely selfish to be like “well it generates slop code for me good enough so I don’t care about all the other bad stuff”. So I just suffer in silence at work because I’m forced to use AI to generate code even though I probably spend more time just reprompting then I would just writing things by hand.

The worst thing is needing to babysit third world contractors they gave a Claude subscription to - the worst slop I have ever seen. Give me a meatsack junior right out of college with no AI over this garbage any day of the week.

And if that wasn’t bad enough - we had to fire our lead CSM the other day because he secretly reverse engineered our private API with Claude and built something that he put unauthenticated on the public internet that leaked a bunch of customer data. Absolute nightmare dealing with the fallout of this that didn’t need to happen. And if that wasn’t bad enough he tried to extort money from us because the thing he built was supposed to replace one of our vendors. This was by-far the worst case of AI psychosis induced Dunning-Krueger I have ever seen. He’s actually going to try to sue the company now for wrongful termination! I bet Claude told him he was absolutey right!

It’s not like I can just find another job either, the market is sh*t and everything else is forcing these tools anyway. So yeah, thank you SV for destroying the tech labour market, suppressing wages, and making the already deteriorating state of software quality even worse.

Frankly, the ROI of these tools is murky at best and it’s gonna get worse as they raise prices. I don’t see what benefit they actually bring beyond a hit of dopamine when it near-shots a task. I have yet to see any killer app that feels truely like AI is doing something worthwhile. And all the startups I see that are AI first are just selling AI orchestration to other AI startups. BORING. They tried making an AI MySpace and it was a disaster, so what CAN these things actually do?

OpenClaw is supposed to be some revolutionary thing but nobody actually does anything truely novel with it. Oh it aggregates your news for you? Congratulations I have an app that already does that without AI and it doesn’t cost me per token.

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.

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.

I must be a filthy casual because I'm sure I can count on one hand the number of times a Github outage has affected my work.

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).

(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)

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

This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.

Other companies considering similar things should take note.

Related: Vibe Coding Will Break Your Company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930738

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.

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.

Don't want to use a service anymore? Fine, stop using it and move to something else. But why publish something that you knows for sure is just going to be bad press for another company and organization?

https://api.github.com/users/<username>

There's probably a few more to be added there now.

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.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...

People uploading more code doesn’t necessitate switching to Microsoft Azure backend, and doing other inane things that only benefit Microsoft.

> 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?

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

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.

I don’t know, I love it. There are many alternatives like bitbucket, gitlab, but GitHub is still better overall.

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.

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.

And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)

I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.

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).

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.

Of course Github using now Azure as a testbed is problematic. Since Azure is mismanaged and doomed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 the problem will either be fixed or we all have to leave. I think they hired cheap staff to manually fix overprovisioned Azure boxes on demand. Maybe the morons at Azure will come to their senses one day, or not.

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.

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

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 !

Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!

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.

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.

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.

It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!

Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-git... [3] https://octocaptcha.com [4] https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw

18 years is a good run as far as these things go.

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 jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

I 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.

Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?

And boy, does it hurt.

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.

"Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

"I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing

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.

That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.

You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things.

> Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub

This is addiction

I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.

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.

GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.

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.

So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.

:)

Take care.

I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.

The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

I 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.

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.

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.

Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!

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.

The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy.

I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.

Thank you for your hard work.

> 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.

Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")

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.

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

The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.

This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.

The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.

The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.

Now there is absolutely a benefit to co-locating issues and PRs with your code in the same git repo. In a way it becomes much simpler to move your entire repository and all activity when everything is in the same .git folder.

With Tangled your code is stored in your code repository and issues and PRs in your data repository. On the other hand the ATProto stuff is what means your project becomes discoverable and that other users in the network automatically can interact with your repository (likes, issues, etc).

It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.

I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.

Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.

I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...

I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.

GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.

But mailing patches is a pain in the ass. VCSes should support squashing and rebasing.

pujil's patch alebgra is sick but the whole system implementation is so complex my guy is still toiling away on it, unfinished, after half a decade

It's called a vesting schedule. ;)

What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.

For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.

I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.

I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.

I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.

It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.

Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?

Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.

...until it comes to bikeshedding new standards

We are actually facing 2 distinct problems:

- Github is a centralized, controlled git hosting, identity, collaboration platform.

- Bots are attacking any public facing interface.

So maybe the solution is:

- to keep a Radicle node private/behind fences to lower the maintenance/security burden, with eventually access to selected collaborators.

- publish the repos with a static site generator like pgit

This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC

> Microsoft doesn't care about you

> why do you care about Microsoft?

You answered your own question there, mate.

This is the same bullshit that people bring up with Facebook, there’s no reason we can’t apply the same rubric to Twitter.

if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.

however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).

so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.

I do agree about performance, though.

Hosting a Docker container is a full-time job? I have worked at several employers self-hosting their own instances without issues or a lot of effort. Many FOSS projects do, that definitely do not have a full-time guy for that. What are you talking about?

For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.

Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!

In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.

Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.

The same goes for Github to a degree. Yes, there are hot paths that "everyone" uses, but also areas where most people never wander and other use daily.

I remember that the first instance of their CI solution was a separate server/service that coordinated CI jobs on runners. That was a bit cumbersome. But then they integrated the CI coordination into the main server and you only needed to figure out the CI runner part.

Today I would likely have gone for Forgejo with runners for such a small company if I were to self-host. Less moving parts and smaller footprint.

Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.

Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.

They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.

Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.

Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).

Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.

   And you, my father, there on the sad height,
   Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
   Do not go gentle into that good night.
   Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Or perhaps another adaptation:

   God, grant me the serenity
   to accept the enshittification I cannot change
   the courage to improve the things I can
   and the wisdom to know the difference.

I’m not sure what staff level means at GitHub, but at some other companies it’s just “senior++”, and people with 10yoe get that title quite often.

An integration layer with github issues or other platforms is definitely not unthinkable.

V1 is about to be released in the coming days.

Thanks for the feedback. I will add a section about that in the readme!

[EDIT] - readme updated with section about event sourcing strategy

Also nice language evolutions: "socialize their changes to projects", "lo-fi approach" :)

> Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.

Arguably "The Stack" contains only permissively licensed code, but there are two repositories of mine inside it. One is a very simple logging library, without any license (which implies "All Rights Reserved"), and another is a fork of LightDM which I worked on, which is GPL licensed.

So any "permissively licensed" dataset probably contains at least one copylefted or strong copyrighted codebase, making them highly suspicious.

== EDIT ==

Found some. Kagi's date-constrained search to the rescue.

1. Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931

2. GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515

3. AI-Powered GitHub Copilot Leaves Preview, Now Costs $100 a Year: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/06/25/0334207/ai-po...

4. GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories (CTRL+F on the page): https://web.archive.org/web/20260428180443/https://github.co...

> This automatically generates the tables and columns... on-the-fly. It infers relations based on naming conventions.

They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.

I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.

As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.

With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.

[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...

[2] see html source for tags

[3] https://my.githero.app/

[4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

I'm sorry but this is just a perfect encapsulation of why American corporations are brazenly bad and corrupt without actual competition.

This is honestly no different than RFK Jr being the Secretary of HHS. I'm sure if you spoke with him, he'd say he was highly competent at this job too.

She is internet famous, sure, but she still has to prove if her ideas on how to evolve GitHub are the right one.

yes, Wine is an emulator

I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...

Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.

They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.

To paraphrase a popular quote from IBM: “Executives and MBAs can never be held accountable: therefore executives and MBAs must not be allowed to make decisions.”

Slightly less flippant: The only way to stop this is to stop letting companies like MSFT gobble up smaller companies. That doesn’t seem likely in the near future, though. Once the Borg assimilate something, it’s just a matter of time before it’s digested and drained of value.

In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.

Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).

Afaik they never took any (serious) VC money.

The things aren't profile pictures not loading in saudi, they're botching merge jobs, git/api operations being down, pull requests not loading, etc. And that's on top of the plethora of UI bugs that have been pervasive for years that aren't blocking functionality.

Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.

Why is the graph more dense on the right side?

and probably Once In A Lifetime

I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.

Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.

They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.

It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.

It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.

What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.

GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.

Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.

No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements.

I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy.

Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge.

Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience.

[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/...

This pops up on here frequently. People misremember the Heroku timeline with Salesforce. Most of Heroku's growth and glory days happened after the acquisition. Salesforce actively invested in it and turned it into the powerhouse that people remember today.

At some point, they stopped, and it's not clear why.

People flip the order of the first two and remember it as "Salesforce acquired Heroku and then they went on a downward spiral" but that's not really what happened. There were many years of growth in between, including the period that almost everyone who remembers Heroku fondly remember it for.

This is incorrect.

    $ git remote get-url origin
    ssh://git@github.com/git-bug/git-bug.git

    $ for n in bugs identities; do echo "${n} on the remote: " $(git ls-remote origin "refs/${n}/\*" | wc -l); done
    bugs on the remote:  453
    identities on the remote:  311

That said, yes, GitHub is still our source of truth, as our web application does not currently support "guest" access, and there are other platform features that our community uses that we do not currently have support for (e.g. discussions and pull requests). Big changes to the web ui are coming soon, which will help to unlock the ability to do these things.

I've also been in talks with the Radicle team about possible collaboration.

When you take OSS projects that scale well, say Linux, Postgres, Kafka, redis, etc. they either scale up (Linux) which is arguable easier, or were able to scale out because there are thousands, if not millions, that have massive deployments pushing them to their limits.

Unless there is some sort of secure way to “open source” operational data for codeberg, or many others running huge deployments of Forgejo I don’t see it being very effective.

I do see Google having another go at code hosting though.

What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?

They aren't, of course. The Y axis is missing. GitHub didn't have 0 daily commits at the start of 2023.

https://handsondataviz.org/how-to-lie-with-charts.html#exagg...

I‘ve noticed that some projects have „Claude“ as one of their top three contributors.

I was there for a couple years after the acquisition and just couldn't stand seeing it. I felt I was becoming useless working in a mad house that was becoming more maddening everyday. And MSFT just keeps replacing leadership with more and more disconnected people who just don't get it, who just never used GitHub like the OG users did. Two years ago I interviewed again for my old team, largely out of curiosity, and the Microsoft engineering manager asked me some brain teaser question as my interview. The disconnect is just too large.

They don't take GitHub seriously. It's a toy to MSFT and vibes matter more than the product itself. And they hire for it using MSFT drone logic, fill it with people hired and profiled to be MSFT-lifers, and these two things don't mix.

Sorry I don't have anything great to say. And of course, many of these MSFT folks were actually damn good, but they were swimming in a sea of MSFT drone.

It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"

Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.

Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.

Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.

Sorry, why the hell would any company do this? Goodwill is measured by MBA's in pennies and they paid *billions*.

This is like that time Google acquired the .dev domain "to reserve it for developers" but then ended up selling it- like everyone said they would.

You have got to be absurdly naive to believe that Microsoft does altruistic things, if there's no direct (or indirect) business they're not doing it: they are famously not a charity.

They have to be the richest men on the planet, retire, and then they'll do some charity.. perhaps because they feel guilty about what they did on an island or something.

If companies actually meant it then they’d sponsor these projects instead of buying them. The reason they choose to buy is so that they can make decisions about the direction of that project. If not immediately, then at least at some point in the future.

All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.

A lot of companies say that when they acquire another, and it might be true for a few years, it might even be the actual intention of the people involved in making the acquisition, but it usually doesn't last.