I&#x27;m curious if your graph had the number of projects its hosting shown as well?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damrnelson.github.io&#x2F;github-historical-uptime&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;damrnelson.github.io&#x2F;github-historical-uptime&#x2F;</a>

It started being bad after MS.It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI

GitHub claims that AI development tools have caused a massive surge in demand in recent months. They need to scale by 30X to keep up with demand.According to GitHub, Azure migration is the attempt at a fix&#x2F;upscaling, not the underlying cause of the issues.Addressing GitHub’s recent availability issues:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;addressing-githubs-recent-availability-issues-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;addressing-gi...</a>An update on GitHub availability:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-github-availability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-...</a>

I glanced at zhe thread you linked. And as I understand they are in the process of migrating, which will take more than a year still.If that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily a problem with Azure itself.

Azure also regularly has incidents due to capacity issues in several regions, so that many Azure-managed services also go down. Some of those incidents have been open continuously for many months now.

Coupled with this (unsubstantiated but thorough) discussion on the internals of Azure, if even a fraction of this below-linked post is true, Github&#x27;s abnormally-filesystem-intensive workflows would have wildly unpredictable performance and reliability forced onto Azure.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isolveproblems.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isolveproblems.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;how-microsoft-vaporize...</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47616242">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47616242</a>

OMG I was a few FAANG-like companies. Most acquisitions failed due to the migration. It always played in the same way:1. The acquired company was small company to the acquirer.
2. We need to improve scalability and reduce cost!Then, they migrated. The new system was worse and didn&#x27;t have parity. It was years. Customers were moving off. The project&#x2F;product shut down.

Azure migration is the most plausible explanation I&#x27;ve heard. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45517173">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45517173</a>

I mean I know we all love to shit on azure, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s partially unavailable for 3 hours a day on avg over the last 3 months?

Azure is not the best, but it mostly works. GitHub gets only 98% reliability for git operation component, reading and committing. This is the most basic component. The fact they are not on this 24&#x2F;7 and it isn&#x27;t fixed is the result of a culture (=what is prioritized, what quality is accepted).

Not necessarily culture, it could be just forcing to migrate to azure that is not reliable, no?

I would say uptime and UX&#x2F;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 &#x2F;pulls and &#x2F;repo&#x2F;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

Nah they must be actively moving infrastructure (to azure?) for the amount of outages they have

It interestingly shows how a centralized system may just fail or become too flaky at unprecedented growth.I suppose it&#x27;s a bit too on the nose to point out that git is decentralized and itself doesn&#x27;t really suffer from this, nor need it.

Yeah if those graphs are even vaguely accurate there&#x27;s really only one explanation: vibe coders pushing previously unimaginable amount of slop.I would not be surprised if Github has to stop offering so many services for free.

We don&#x27;t have a labeled y-axis so their record usage could be a 5% increase for all they&#x27;re showing us.

And yet GitHub has felt the most dead it ever did. Less quality contributions. Less feeling of community. All the open source projects are struggling.They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive

I&#x27;d add a third point: record service usage.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-github-availability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-...</a>

Yeah, this is what I was going to say. These two theories are not mutually exclusive, and there&#x27;s an argument that they&#x27;re casually related

#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.

I suppose there&#x27;s a reason that most Microsoft development shops tend to vendor their dependencies as a culture.Gamedev being the most prominent that I have personally witnessed.EDIT: Why are you booing me, I&#x27;m right.

It&#x27;s been on a downward trend before agentic coding took over. I suspect it&#x27;s a mix of Microsoft culture and Microsoft infrastructure. It&#x27;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.

Any more context on the copilot training note? More pointers would be very interesting, but we&#x27;d need to keep in mind how many different underlying models were (are?) branded as copilot. I thought at some points the &quot;copilot&quot; model in autocomplete contexts was a finetuned GPT from OAI.Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.

Note: I&#x27;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&#x27;s product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub&#x27;s code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they&#x27;re doing &amp; regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we&#x27;re here.GitHub&#x27;s first enshittification cycle is over. Now we&#x27;re starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon&#x27;s decay from relevance phase.It&#x27;ll be a slow decay. It won&#x27;t fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.

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.

If you&#x27;ve worked with Azure you don&#x27;t need to be explained what the problem is. I&#x27;ll believe that workloads are different now than they were some years ago but... they literally are the cause for it so no sympathy from me there.

Well, it started just after the Microsoft acquisition, when AI did not exist, and coincided with news of Microsoft fully ingesting the GitHub team and forcing architecture and priority changes, and has steadily continued since. So idk, it’s a mystery. Maybe it was caused by the thing that did not exist when it happened. Microsoft just posted on a PR blog that it’s the thing that did not exist, and they’re famously truthful, open, and altruistic.

What do we think is more to blame for GitHub&#x27;s massive decrease in quality? I&#x27;ve heard the following theories:1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.Perhaps it&#x27;s a bit of both.

It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company&#x27;s proxy screwing with HTTP&#x2F;2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I&#x27;m nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.

Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.

Sourceforge died in a very different way though. Bundling spyware&#x2F;crapware in install packages for open source software was a serious breach of trust, and was pretty much the direct reason for mass migration to Github. Github is failing on the technical side, but they at least mostly have their brand value intact. I think it will still take quite a lot for a mass migration of the same scale to happen.

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 :(.

&gt; The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.If it weren&#x27;t bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn&#x27;t report them, so the actual number is even worse.

In their defense, they dramatically &quot;over&quot;-report sev-2&#x2F;3&#x27;s (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is.If you filter for major&#x2F;critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9&#x27;s.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isgithubcooked.com&#x2F;?severities=major.critical" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isgithubcooked.com&#x2F;?severities=major.critical</a>Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9&#x27;s of availability in for the last 9 months.

Wait, this is insane! And the method they use to classify an outage seems solid as well. Imagine being a Github dev working in this environment.

Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h&#x2F;day.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlineornot.com&#x2F;uptime-calculator&#x2F;87.25" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlineornot.com&#x2F;uptime-calculator&#x2F;87.25</a>

Hey, you leave Creative Assembly out of this!

This is a general observation, no hard data, but I find there seems to be a wall at 2 years after an acquisition. By 2 years a lot of the best talent leave the company entirely or go somewhere else in the company. Things can cruise along just fine for a bit, but as the institutional knowledge slowly leaves it gets worse and worse. Couple that with the bureaucracy and insanity of a global mega-corporation, the quality fades slowly at first, then it picks up.

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community.As so often happens, that didn&#x27;t last long.Nest was originally independent. Didn&#x27;t take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.I&#x27;m sure there are countless other examples.

Slack has suffered the same thing under Salesforce.

&gt; GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they&#x27;re bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually cratersCan you explain what you mean by this? Like what does &quot;fine&quot; mean? What, specifically in the management, is the &quot;decline&quot;? What does &quot;craters&quot; mean?

It&#x27;s just beancounters doing what they do best, counting beans and screwing up what was previously alright.

Big companies usually buy other small companies for their users, once the users move to their platform, things change.

I&#x27;m afraid this is a form of reversion to the mean. Successful startups are made of exceptional people: the founders, the initial investors, the first employees, the first clients. But when they get acquired by much larger companies, they are necessarily diluted in pool of people that are more &quot;normal&quot;, less exceptional. This includes the customer base that is more &quot;normal&quot; as well. Slowly but surely, the extraordinary product&#x2F;service the startup has been developing reverts to the mean. This is quite sad, because it feels inevitable. I&#x27;d like to know how to avoid it.

&gt; CA (where software goes to die)CA got bought (ironically) by Broadcom 8 years ago, so now Broadcom is where software goes to die.

&gt; Everything becomes the numbers game.Death by spreadsheet. Happens to everything.

&gt; insider perspective on thisI do not work at MSFT but I don&#x27;t feel that I need insider perspective to understand what&#x27;s going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they&#x27;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&#x27;s a good M&amp;A team that doesn&#x27;t fuck it up but that&#x27;s sadly rare.

Even if you go service by service you&#x27;re talking about critical things like `git` operations (literally what they&#x27;re named for) at a single nine, and stuff that&#x27;s pretty basic like static web hosting as only two nines. They literally can&#x27;t even keep static webpages up.

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

Hm. I read that as saying that their users are writing more code with the assistance of LLMs, thus placing more stress on their systems. I do not read it as making any comment about their own practices.

They are mostly blaming their shift to vibe coding for their problems. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-github-availability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-...</a>

While I wouldn&#x27;t necessarily phrase it this way, there is a chart going around social media that tries to imply that GitHub had basically 100% uptime right up until the MS acquisition. All it takes is either 1) having been there or 2) a cursory search of HN to know that this is a complete fabrication.

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&#x27;s a massively clobbered together mess.

A big part of my job is doing code reviews, and its very common that pages or diffs just don&#x27;t load. Or PRs literally don&#x27;t appear in the PR list, even though they exist. It&#x27;s a daily occurrence to play the &#x27;is my internet down or is GitHub just being shit again?&#x27; game.Oh, and don&#x27;t forget the cases where the diff view sometimes misses some files for unknown reasons. Both in the &#x27;new experience&#x27; and the &#x27;legacy view&#x27;. You just can&#x27;t trust it as much anymore.

Yes, many times. Roughly once a week this year my team or an associated team can&#x27;t ship changes because PRs, GitHub Actions, or some other associated mechanism is down.

Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven&#x27;t even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;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&#x2F;CD.

&gt; crumble as an organizationI think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they&#x27;re hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn&#x27;t exactly spell doom for GitHub

Microslop only really cares about the enterprise customer.  Those are slow to change, so once they&#x27;re in github, they&#x27;ll stay forever.

i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle.
It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios

wow, I knew it was bad but I was gaslighting myself a bit. 0 9&#x27;s is crazy.

&gt; I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on thisI&#x27;m not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.

It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There&#x27;s a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc.Regardless of the reason, it&#x27;s undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it&#x27;s clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven&#x27;t abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don&#x27;t think inertia is enough to sustain a company.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrshu.github.io&#x2F;github-statuses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrshu.github.io&#x2F;github-statuses&#x2F;</a>

&gt;I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months. We have a plan but I&#x27;m also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).what a cliff hanger!As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it&#x27;s kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it&#x27;s time to explore the idea of unbundling the social&#x2F;discovery layer from the code hosting&#x2F;dev tool so we can live between the myriad git&#x2F;jj hosts but still do &quot;social coding&quot; together.

Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!

It&#x27;s not always you see a status page so colorful...

Yes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrshu.github.io&#x2F;github-statuses&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mrshu.github.io&#x2F;github-statuses&#x2F;</a>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

&gt; past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an XIs it really this bad?I&#x27;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.

maybe, but tangled knots actually federate. you could contribute to repos on knot.ghostty.org and knot.tangled.org with the same account. no other platform permits one identity across instances.

But a tangled account doesn&#x27;t solve the problem of needing an account on those other forges. You just added one more account someone needs to make.

I&#x27;m also closely following Tangled&#x27;s development. Their two biggest weak points: lack of private repositories and ux design (which I don&#x27;t have a problem with but I&#x27;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&#x27;m excited for it.

&gt;manage all these different accounts for each place they contributeFor me that&#x27;s a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI&#x2F;CD, issues, releases between them. I don&#x27;t have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.

I don’t know if it’s production ready yet, but tangled.org is a really interesting take on a forge and I’ve been watching it for a while. It decentralizes the centralized parts of GitHub in a pretty neat way. The biggest problem with forges that aren’t GitHub is people need to make and manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute (which almost certainly will lower the amount of people who do. Maybe this is a good thing these days though...)Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.

Possibly in a few years from now we&#x27;ll get actual data about how many outages we&#x27;ve seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for &quot;AI everywhere&quot;.

Gitlab? Three distinct codebases is quite a lot to be honest. Especially when Forgejo has the lineage of Gitea and Gogs in its wake.

&gt; I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it&#x27;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&#x27;s not what I&#x27;d call &quot;many&quot;.

Jeremie (of XMPP) has a neat project, v-it, which uses atproto (Bluesky) to let people socialize their changes to projects. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v-it.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;v-it.org&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.

&gt; I&#x27;m still holding out hope for distributed and federated git forges.Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you&#x27;re not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.

I&#x27;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&#x2F;PRs without everyone allowing signups on their self-hosted forges. That could be achieved without hosting every line of code everyone&#x27;s ever written in the same crumbling infrastructure.It&#x27;ll probably never happen. But it&#x27;d be really nice if it did.

Unfortunately, naming things is hard, and JujitsuHub just doesn&#x27;t roll off the tongue the same way that GitHub does. jjhub? forgesu?

Xit has a better “take” on Git. Pijul &amp; Darcs still have better fundamentals.

But how much of that do people actually need? Most users don’t use most features. The core MVP is not that big.

Does it do anything that GitLab does not?With what I heard about GitHub Actions, the GitLab CI pipelines should be much better.Not that I haven’t shot myself in the foot with GitLab pipelines on numerous occasions.

It does a lot but at the end of the day, if the core functionality is just not good anymore, maybe put all the side projects on the actual side and focus on how to make sure core functionality suck less.For example - We adopted GitHub Actions, then we swapped it out this year. Our own primary use case is code hosting + PRs. We want it to talk to the other (better) tools that intended for their use case. We want it in a secure yet fast and available manner. Nothing else. I don&#x27;t care about projects, issues, or whatever super app they&#x27;re trying to become.

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.

Every time Fossil comes up, people&#x27;s big objection is that you can&#x27;t squash commits. Personally, I&#x27;m fine with that - I tend to agree with Hipp that the repo history should not sacrifice truth for the sake of pettiness in the timeline. But a lot of people seem to disagree, which limits the audience for Fossil. I use Fossil for my own projects but I wouldn&#x27;t expect it to become big like git is.

Maybe it&#x27;s time for fossil to get another look... It&#x27;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&#x27;ll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they&#x27;re getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.

I agree, but it does have faults. Performance is woeful, and managing an on-prem instance is (literally) a full time job.

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.

- &quot;Ok guys first thing is move off Azure and ditch Copilot to get back to the level of stability we had before all that mess&quot;- &quot;Uuh, no&quot;Be a pretty quick story

&gt; GitHub should hire him to be their CEOAnd then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.

&gt; GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn&#x27;t change Microsoft&#x27;s ownership, and he&#x27;d still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users&#x27; throats.

During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.And I remember seeing that and thinking &quot;huh... not at all a bad idea.&quot;There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren&#x27;t just &quot;managers&quot;, but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it&#x27;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.

n=1 but i don&#x27;t really discover new projects via github, it&#x27;s mainly here, reddit, or via colleagues. then again, i selfhost forgejo so don&#x27;t have a real presence on github

Self-hosted Gitlab is great. A lot of the US government uses this via bigbang if familiar. Designing things with an &quot;airgap&quot; in mind and control of your services is paramount in today&#x27;s AI rush of slop.

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

As in, to present themselves as the new defacto git host, capitalizing on GitHub&#x27;s actual + perceived lack of reliability

&gt; 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)?

At least it isn&#x27;t Bitbucket.I think Atlassian and Microsoft are genuinely in a competition to see who can make worse software and still have customers.

Gitlab is written in Ruby on Rails. Don‘t expect to much from it.

GitLab? We use gitlab for work. Its way worse in comparison.Last week I encountered a bug where my merge request simply didn&#x27;t show that I deleted a file. Apparently it&#x27;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&#x27;t have the Gitlab duo activated, it still pops out regularly eventhough I can&#x27;t use it besides closing it.
...and I don&#x27;t even want to start with their issue buard.It strongly reminds me of Jira in terms of quality, which is no compliment.

Maybe Ghostty will follow Zig to Codeberg, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like a fit to me.

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.

Same here. I&#x27;m mildly optimistic tangled will go somewhere and be a viable replacement

Tbf its free software and the quality will go up the more people are using it and contributing.

Well, that page took 13 seconds to load for me :&#x2F;

Eh, I kinda hope not. Codeberg&#x27;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&#x27;t seem like a strict improvement.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.codeberg.eu&#x2F;status&#x2F;codeberg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;status.codeberg.eu&#x2F;status&#x2F;codeberg</a>

I&#x27;m very interested in where ghostty ends up - I wonder if they&#x27;ll follow Zig to Codeberg?It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn&#x27;t look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.

Anyone who makes fun of you for feeling things probably isn&#x27;t anyone you want to listen to, anyway.Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.

(Needless) complexity is going on.KISS and you sleep better.That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: &quot;It&#x27;s done&quot; without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because &quot;that&#x27;s what everyone else uses&quot;... Pure Enshittification.

Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn&#x27;t care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...No AI needed at all. Only humans.

Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.

Way overcomplicating design is one challenge that keeps getting worse.Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.

&gt; I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing itI think the &quot;ridiculously dramatic&quot; part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I&#x27;m not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.

&gt; it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays.Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that&#x27;s left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.

&gt;The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80&#x2F;90s era? Segfault everywhere, &quot;fatal error was successful&quot;, kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it&#x27;s not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing itThis quote from the post resonated with me:&gt; I want to get work done and it doesn&#x27;t want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn&#x27;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?

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?

&quot;They&#x27;re your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them.&quot;

I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don&#x27;t know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there&#x27;s a phenomenon of decline in general that&#x27;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&#x27;t a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it&#x27;s tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.

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.

&gt; I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I&#x27;m embarrassed to say).No, it&#x27;s not. There are things we like&#x2F;love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.&gt; I&#x27;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&#x27;t and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We&#x27;re human, this is normal.For finding their way, I can&#x27;t be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.

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.

I don&#x27;t think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It&#x27;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.

Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I&#x27;m commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. 
I saw your post and immediately thought, &quot;good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long.&quot; I don&#x27;t hate big M nor the &#x27;github ecosystem&#x27; (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.

Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you&#x27;re crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.

KDE&#x27;s hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system. 
For keyboard expansions espansso&#x2F;ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn&#x27;t pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn&#x27;t work anymore, global shortcuts have been limited... The essence is the same, but it is so broken that it has a real productivity impact that will require a lot of effort to correct, and would depend on upstream fixes...

There isn&#x27;t inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can&#x27;t love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.I&#x27;d be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not&#x2F;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&#x27;ve all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).

Github won&#x27;t shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn&#x27;t even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don&#x27;t care either. If they don&#x27;t &#x27;find their way&#x27;, 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&#x27;s only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.

So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me:&gt; Since then, I&#x27;ve opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I&#x27;d love to see the data), but I can&#x27;t imagine more than a week per yearHow could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that&#x27;s a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?

Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn&#x27;t just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you&#x27;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&#x27;s hosted. Best of luck!

Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn&#x27;t overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn&#x27;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&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22868406">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22868406</a>

What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?

It&#x27;s a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it&#x27;s mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.If you&#x27;re still considering vendors, I think you&#x27;ll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality &amp; uptime doesn&#x27;t have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.

You feel how you feel and that&#x27;s totally fine.

&gt; Its given me so much and I&#x27;m so thankful for it. But, it&#x27;s not what it used to be. I don&#x27;t know.Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci&#x2F;stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation&#x2F;beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn&#x27;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&#x2F;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.

Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it&#x27;s become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?The amount of impact I&#x27;ve seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.

If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.github.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;YOUR_USERNAME_HERE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;api.github.com&#x2F;users&#x2F;YOUR_USERNAME_HERE</a> and fetch it.My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I&#x27;ve had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.

Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.

I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can&#x27;t miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.It&#x27;s interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)

You sound like you just want to make the world a better place &#x2F;s

Fyi your HN description still says Heroku

&gt; In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It&#x27;s messy. I&#x27;m not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into.Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.

The heroku mention here struck a chord for me. I don’t feel as attached to GitHub for some reason but Heroku was the first web host I used where I felt like “this is how cool a web-based tech-oriented product can be”.So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.

What you built was a community, not a website owned by Microsoft — it could port just fine to GitLab.“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It&#x27;s not a true statement for users.There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.

<pre><code> &gt; My version of your post reads differently: 
 &gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;
 &gt; Walking away would be easy.
</code></pre>
Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to &quot;tough it out&quot; with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren&#x27;t good&#x2F;healthy and it is time to walk away, as sticking around just ends up being needlessly flagellent.Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github&#x27;s Heroku moment.

github hasn&#x27;t absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it&#x27;s quality is suffering.the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.

looks like you work at github.I completely understand a &quot;people who give a shit stick around&quot; mentality if you work there, but you can&#x27;t expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it&#x27;s broken.

As someone with the ID 1653, I&#x27;ve totally given up on the thing. I&#x27;ve even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.

&quot;Stick around to make it better&quot;, exclaimed the abusive partner.

fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster.  microsoft&#x27;s sick monopoly has dragged humanity back by years from where we should be. every hour wasted, every email lost, every skilled career sacrificed to their garbage is the future lost.

As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal &quot;Exit, Loyalty and Voice&quot;: &quot;an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance&quot;.Don&#x27;t feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).

Github isn&#x27;t a public good or a person; it&#x27;s a product for a for-profit company, whose aim is to squeeze profit out of you. They care nothing for you and will dump you the moment it&#x27;s profitable.I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.&gt; Occam&#x27;s razor applies hereI think the simpler explanation is clearly that it&#x27;s a for-profit company and these problems aren&#x27;t worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don&#x27;t care (or don&#x27;t know).If Github were to put out a statement saying &quot;service quality is our priority&quot;, it is fairly meaningless. If they added &quot;here&#x27;s how we&#x27;ll get there&quot;, maybe it helps some. Moreso -- &quot;from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs&quot;, then maybe something would actually happen.

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;What&#x27;s the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh&#x27;s and I&#x27;ve been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.You&#x27;re an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...</a>). Yesterday he recommitted to it (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-github-availability&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;news-insights&#x2F;company-news&#x2F;an-update-on-...</a>), writing &quot;We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover.&quot; GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You&#x27;ve explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.So I&#x27;ll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub&#x27;s priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?

I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can&#x27;t remember) where it was announced. I loved octocat. I was a git fanatic. It has been extremely disappointing.I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.But that&#x27;s just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they&#x27;ve reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could&#x27;ve reacted to them differently.It does not deserve to get better.It would be very good for society if GitHub&#x27;s market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn&#x27;t be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone&#x27;s code.Just look at all the tricks you&#x27;ve been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]GitHub shouldn&#x27;t get better. It should decline in popularity.You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;github_ai_training_policy_changes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theregister.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;03&#x2F;26&#x2F;github_ai_training_po...</a>

I appreciate that you&#x27;re staying inside with that mentality.Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell&#x27;s habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.Good luck, and we&#x27;re all counting on you.(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)

huh, I&#x27;ve never thought to check my github id. I don&#x27;t remember myself being an early adopter.

The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn&#x27;t care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.

&quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;This only works in democratic settings. In capitalist corporations, typical liberalist parliamentarism and so on it does not work, only coercion does, which might be peaceful, like a strike or boycott, or it might not be.

&gt; t&#x27;s not &quot;more AI coding&quot; and it&#x27;s not &quot;big bad Microsoft.&quot; It&#x27;s scaleBesides &quot;That&#x27;s what makes us money and pays my bills&quot;, there is no real reason to keep building github as this centralized, all-encompassing system that needs to work at global scale.Engineering is about understanding that everything is about trade-offs, and eerything keeps pointing out to the fact that wrong choices are being made there. You can throw as many people as you want or all the MS money at it, but as long as Github &quot;engineers&quot; that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in&#x2F;of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman&#x27;s well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).Personally, I find &quot;loyalty&quot; perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being &quot;irrational&quot; for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only &quot;glue&quot; holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

This is called brand loyalty, and it&#x27;s one of the first thing they&#x27;ll abuse.

I didn&#x27;t know this was a sport. I&#x27;m GitHub user 43053 :-)

I used to work at GitHub. I think you should find a new job.Before Microsoft came along, the entire company was aligned from the bottom to the top around the goal of delivering a single great product. As soon as they bought us, that changed; there were now lots of ways for an individual to succeed at GitHub-the-division-of-Microsoft that had nothing to do with GitHub-the-product. Now GitHub doesn&#x27;t even have its own top, the org chart just smears into the Microsoft one at some hazy point. Perverse incentives abound.An organization like Microsoft can never recreate the magic that was GitHub. There&#x27;s just too many competing interests and agendas that have absolutely noting to do with making GitHub better. In the time before I left, I actually encountered many people who didn&#x27;t care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;At best that&#x27;s half of the equation. You also have to continually hire new people who give a shit, and you have to do that within the context of Microsoft.Given the rot already evident, there really isn&#x27;t any incentive for people who care to join. They would have to care more than the organization does about the product, and there would have to be many of them.Once product in large companies get to this point, there&#x27;s no real way back. Quality will max out at the minimum required to retain the revenue. And if that fails for too long, it&#x27;ll be put in product hospice.

I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I&#x27;m glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn&#x27;t enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (&lt;3), telling people to do what made GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn&#x27;t go anywhere meaningful.I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub&#x27;s availability still includes the world&#x27;s third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people&#x27;s most basic needs, you&#x27;re worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of &quot;throw everything at the screen&quot; style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.

&gt; &quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;No. It only gets better if people who stick around give a shit - not the other way around.

Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.It&#x27;s okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I&#x27;m GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there&#x27;s ~180m GH accounts nowadays)My version of your post reads differently:&quot;GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better&quot;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&#x27;t feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it&#x27;s precious that I can&#x27;t walk away. I&#x27;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&#x27;s messy. I&#x27;m not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku&#x2F;Salesforce debacle. Occam&#x27;s razor applies here: it&#x27;s not &quot;more AI coding&quot; and it&#x27;s not &quot;big bad Microsoft.&quot; It&#x27;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&#x27;s not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.

I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It&#x27;s annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they&#x27;re reflections on years past.

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&#x27;s had for 40 years is almost at its endThe 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;spool-of-wire-guy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;spool-of-wire-guy</a>

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&#x27;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&#x27;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

&gt; Nobody should cry over a SaaSThis 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&#x27;s so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.

&quot;Lately, I&#x27;ve been very publicly critical of GitHub. I&#x27;ve been mean about it. I&#x27;ve been angry about it. I&#x27;ve hurt people&#x27;s feelings. I&#x27;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&#x27;m mad at it. I&#x27;m sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it.&quot;Same :( their 9 5&#x27;s is embarassing

If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I&#x27;m very interested to hear about it.

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.

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

&gt; I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I&#x27;m embarrassed to say).&gt; I&#x27;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.

So far everything is going according to the plan. Humans are really close to make the AI that will replace them and enter into the next phase of the plan.Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?

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

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&#x27;s just MS.

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.

I don&#x27;t know why but I don&#x27;t want to make fun of you. Just sad you can&#x27;t enjoy it anymore.

No man, I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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 &quot;look at open source being made in real time&quot;. We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.

This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-)&quot;Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8</a>&quot;I&#x27;m not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I&#x27;m just going to call you ugly and stupid. That&#x27;s the deal.&quot;

It&#x27;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&#x27;s not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that&#x27;s a good thing.

Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You&#x27;re an incredible engineer and I&#x27;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 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&#x2F;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.

&gt; Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things.We don&#x27;t cry over things, we cry over what things mean.I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.

hugThank you for your hard work.

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&#x27;m down, but I start all my new games with Godot.I&#x27;m not sad though. Unity is like a friend I&#x27;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.

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

I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life.That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.

I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I&#x27;m embarrassed to say).Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I&#x27;m so thankful for it. But, it&#x27;s not what it used to be. I don&#x27;t know.We&#x27;ve been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting &quot;publish&quot; makes it so very real.I&#x27;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.

Ghostty is leaving GitHub