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.
It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company's proxy screwing with HTTP/2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I'm nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.
It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc.
Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.
All of that is revisionist history at best. GitHub was a pile a shit long before Microsoft bought it has everyone forgotten when it would be a coin-flip on any given day if the site was even functional?
GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
Have those outages actually been blocking your work? Somehow I haven't even noticed, just seen complaints on HN. I'm not saying it's not real, just wondering where the gap is.
So what? People have to unlearn this kind of brand loyalty. Companies are not people and not your friends. They are in the business of making money. We need to be more aloof and simply use their tools when useful and not get emotionally attached. Most of the managers and likely the devs had a good deal. Good money, and if it collapses, people still have a good resume line and can move on. And we users can also move on. There are plenty of other service providers of code hosting and CI/CD.
I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub
i feel like scaling is rarely brought into the conversation. It’s easy to hate on ms, especially with their AI slop narratives, but they did get a sudden and then ongoing influx of users that the system was not designed to handle.
It’s the kiss of death and it’s not anything new in terms of product failure scenarios
>I’ll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months. We have a plan but I'm also very much still in discussions with multiple providers (both commercial and FOSS).
what a cliff hanger!
As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.
> past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X
Is it really this bad?
I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
Yeah, we use GH heavily at work (not so much GHA for critical workflows, thank god). They have an outage that breaks our git operations once a week at least. Like, webhooks not delivered, PRs not showing up, git operations not working, API issues… and that’s not counting GitHub actions which we only use for noncritical workflows
I 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.
>manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute
For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.
Possibly in a few years from now we'll get actual data about how many outages we've seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for "AI everywhere".
During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
The problem is that what users want GitHub to be and what their owners (Microsoft) want them to be are disjoint.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
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.
Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.
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
Self-hosted Gitlab is great. A lot of the US government uses this via bigbang if familiar. Designing things with an "airgap" in mind and control of your services is paramount in today's AI rush of slop.
I'm very interested in where ghostty ends up - I wonder if they'll follow Zig to Codeberg?
It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!
There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.
I know this is ridiculously dramatic, but its the truth: I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).
Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.
We've been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.
I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
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.
No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked.
I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.
I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook.
And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years.
So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.
It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.
Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D
I 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.
In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.
Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!)
This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:
You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.
More importantly, Mitchell, you care.
Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.
> GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better
Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.
Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.
It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public.
GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.
We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade.
To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.
I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you.
I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.
And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.
It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.
Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.
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.
I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message.
It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!
Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.
> I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.
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
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 is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).
On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.
PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.
I hope this doesn’t come across as making fun, but it had never occurred to me that GitHub could be anything more than a tool for hosting my source code. So if you had written this same piece about all the good times you’d had in Windows Explorer, I’d be no less confused.
Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?
To be honest, the blog post is quite a lot of self-indulgent waffle. But I forgive you for that, "each to their own", as they say.
What I won't forgive you for is writing such a long blog post and then completely missing the bottom-line.
Do not write "I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months".
If you're going to make me read such a long blog post, then at least have an answer ready-to-go for the critical question that everybody is going to ask !
I read the post yesterday, and read it again today before commenting, and it's not really self-indulgent waffle.
Ghostty might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.
If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.
Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.
I'm a bit lost about the problem. Is it really about crying about outages? I'm aware of enshittification issues in the broader tech field but the post and this comment don't really say what the problem is. If this is supposed to be some kind of signal and wakeup call, more info would help. For context I'm a lightweight Github user for over a decade, mostly putting up personal projects without much collab, and opening issues in other repos when I find bugs, just cloning and forking stuff (mainly in the machine learning community, but also in general Linux tools). For me it works okay enough, compared with the overall landscape of SaaS. I'm not a fan, don't feel any loyalty and my expectations for user abuse from big tech are admittedly pretty abysmal by now. I'm just not seeing what specifically happened with github to trigger this.
Naw I did the same after I got "piled" on at Metafilter a few years back, and after 18-years buttoned my account because I was sick of the toxicity (I am an ancient BBS/usenet guy from decades ago - I can handle "flamewars"). I am pretty "left-leaning" liberal, but the "purity tests", insular nature and extreme "wokeness" that place has turned into has basically ruined it. They have monthly meta discussions/threads on why they are losing attention/participation, yet they don't seem to recognize that they drive people away.
Back to Github... I wonder how much of the "enshitification" can be tied to the acquisition and corporatization by Microsoft... (I am going to guess "alot")
I don't have much of an opinion about Github, but I just want to add that your feelings are valid. It is not a stupid thing and I hope nobody is making fun of you for crying over it.
The same thing happened to Twitter. All the online properties we used will be gutted and sunsetted eventually. The only thing we can do is move on and slash and burn a new pasture.
I got kind of emotional when I left Reddit a few years ago during the API drama. Moderating for years, participating for like 15… it’s hard to not feel emotionally invested in that. Sure one could simply say “it’s just a website,” but obviously it’s more than that.
People will comfort you about your emotions and your tears and then tell you you’re wrong to feel sad about it. They’re lying to you. Your instincts about how you feel are completely correct.
The reality is it is a bit irrational to love a saas so much and cry about it. I’ve been using GitHub as long as you and I feel nothing for it. To most people moving off of GitHub is a huge hassle, an annoyance rather than a tragedy.
I think the biggest damage is the project visibility. Everything else is more of an annoyance.
I love the ideas and motivations underpinning Github's creation. For a long time Github was the best instantiation of those ideals. Maybe not so much anymore. Transitions are always the most difficult but they often result in new perspectives.
Thanks for all your open source work. You changed the industry for the better. Are you thinking of building a Github competitor? I would find that very appealing.
One of the biggest gifts in life is to find a true passion. And for every passion there are two sides to the coin - the joy and the suffering. The agony and the ecstasy. It’s a gift to care so much; and it inspires.
It's not stupid to share your emotions towards a platform you've grown passionate of, especially when since Microsoft's acquisition, the platform has become enshittified, and now, vibe coded to an extent that there is not a single week where there are no issues with the platform.
I'm interested to see where you land the project at post-GH. The platform has just not grown in the ways I had hoped and their reliability has been a real issue for awhile now.
I would hope they would prioritize stability and features that devs have been asking for but it seems like that is not where their focus is at.
Not surprised, I think I was subconsciously waiting for this as Mitchell has been very vocal about Github on X. They killed a lot of developer goodwill, and I feel this is just a start of the mass exodus.
Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))
I can appreciate Hashimoto's genuine feelings about Github, and the world of open-source software development that it opened for him and that he spent a significant chunk of his life participating in.
On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.
I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.
So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.
> Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.
I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.
Radicle is such a cool concept and seems to be working great. The only thing it needs is a better way to search through the projects hosted on each node.
They're all just value propositions. Is it worth my time and money? There ya go that's it.
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
The centrality of GitHub was part of its appeal. It’s where you went to see where nearly every (obviously not all) open source project was being developed. Based on his post, the network effect was a large part of the draw and the reason he stayed despite reliability issues. A more federated set of git UIs will never capture the same feeling.
I could imagine something like the mastodon protocol but for git forges, where even though they are separate websites there would be no true boundary to discoverability/interaction
I've never understood the enthusiastic sharecropping for Github. It's a reasonable tradeoff to let Github own the public home for your code, but no reason to be happy about it.
> I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
I think that model works well when it comes to code, but I don't think the non-free software movement ever really figured out how to deal with services and data. Even if GitHub was completely 100% GPL Free Software... the user accounts and everyone's comment history and stuff lives on a database somewhere. The servers are running somewhere. That's where the community is.
Even if you could take GitHub and spin up your own fork running the exact same software, the community isn't there. The interactions aren't there, the history isn't. It's like building a clone of your childhood house and wondering why your young parents don't magically appear in it.
You're completely right. I care about the free software movement from an ethical/freedom-preserving perspective, and I do think that many facets of the movement are too grounded in the details of how personal computer software in the 80s and 90s worked, rather than in the question of how to import the user-freedom-perserving ethos to services and data.
The question of how to create free-software-mediated online communities that don't involve storing user identity and data in a company's private database is critical. The user database, and what can be built upon it, is the single biggest reason people do use Github despite its flaws.
I don't think the community of GitHub matters as much as people keep saying here. I think each project has its own small number of developers, and getting all of them to move is much easier. It has a larger number of bug reporters and downloaders, who only interact with the project occasionally and are perfectly capable of doing the same thing anywhere else.
> On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical.
Since we’re getting all philosophical, heartbreak isn’t inherently bad, it means you had the opportunity to love something deeply. Being engaged in the world means taking risks on things that might disappoint you. I do wish more of that love were directed at open source, but it’s not as if open source is without heartbreak and disappointment. Richard Stallman is sort of emblematic of someone who starts out with good intentions, but whose paranoid risk aversion probably put a ceiling on his potential?
I never had any positive relation to Github. Free software should be developed on free platforms. So I very much welcome this. Fuck Github. Every single outage Microslop vibe codes is a good thing.
But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me.
I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.
> I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.
I'm with ya, but building services at the scale of Github, (even when it was a fledgling) requires resources and budgets that very few FOSS projects can even try for. So any replacement is essentially guaranteed to happen commercially.
The original git model enabled part of what was necessary for a fully distributed social phenomenon, but it didn't even go half way. None of the critical social aspects of Github were, are or will ever become distributed, now that a gatekeeper monopolist owns it.
If you want a true FOSS replacement, it's going to need to do at least an order of magnitude more prep work before launching. We've already seen what we get when somebody puts up a plain git server, and we've seen when a single company extends it to become social with a proprietary, non-distributed model.
A better future requires much, much more up-front work.
It is sad to see how far GitHub has fallen. Will also be interesting to where mitchellh takes the project, I imagine codeberg and sources are possibilities.
> To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.
A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.
Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).
It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.
> Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo.
Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.
Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)
It's definitely time to turn these loose web features into a real program. I don't understand the desire to clone github as a website. It's demonstrably 10,000x more work to maintain github.com than a "github" command.
322 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] thread1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.
2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.
Perhaps it's a bit of both.
Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.
1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/
GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
I think that is exaggerating things a bit... GitHub is alive and well, and they're hosting more and more projects each month. A few well-known projects leaving every now and then doesn't exactly spell doom for GitHub
I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.
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.
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.
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.
For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
And then impose the same requirements that killed GitHub in the first place.
Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.
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
It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!
There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.
I wish Codeberg the best, but I thought it was a questionable choice for Zig and feel similarly for Ghostty—doesn't seem like a strict improvement.
[1] https://status.codeberg.eu/status/codeberg
Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.
We've been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.
I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
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 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.
"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 do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it.
I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong.
Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place.
GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.
We 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.
Thank you for your hard work.
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.
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.
Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
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.
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.
To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
I 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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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 is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).
On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.
PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.
Can I ask what was there that made you visit the site for anything other than reviewing pull requests and issues?
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 might be an open source and free product, but that doesn't mean that Mitchell in particular, that works on it, treats it any differently to how a for-profit company would treat its own software.
If you're using a SAAS that offers a product to both companies and individuals with the same feature set, and it's uptime is anything less three-nines, it's not fit for purpose.
Frankly, I'm amazed companies aren't walking away and giving the same reasons.
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")
Take care.
So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.
18 years is a good run as far as these things go.
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.
:)
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.
Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168
On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.
I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.
So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.
Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.
I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.
- https://gitsocial.org/
- https://radicle.dev/
- https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
I think that model works well when it comes to code, but I don't think the non-free software movement ever really figured out how to deal with services and data. Even if GitHub was completely 100% GPL Free Software... the user accounts and everyone's comment history and stuff lives on a database somewhere. The servers are running somewhere. That's where the community is.
Even if you could take GitHub and spin up your own fork running the exact same software, the community isn't there. The interactions aren't there, the history isn't. It's like building a clone of your childhood house and wondering why your young parents don't magically appear in it.
The question of how to create free-software-mediated online communities that don't involve storing user identity and data in a company's private database is critical. The user database, and what can be built upon it, is the single biggest reason people do use Github despite its flaws.
Since we’re getting all philosophical, heartbreak isn’t inherently bad, it means you had the opportunity to love something deeply. Being engaged in the world means taking risks on things that might disappoint you. I do wish more of that love were directed at open source, but it’s not as if open source is without heartbreak and disappointment. Richard Stallman is sort of emblematic of someone who starts out with good intentions, but whose paranoid risk aversion probably put a ceiling on his potential?
But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me.
I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.
I'm with ya, but building services at the scale of Github, (even when it was a fledgling) requires resources and budgets that very few FOSS projects can even try for. So any replacement is essentially guaranteed to happen commercially.
The original git model enabled part of what was necessary for a fully distributed social phenomenon, but it didn't even go half way. None of the critical social aspects of Github were, are or will ever become distributed, now that a gatekeeper monopolist owns it.
If you want a true FOSS replacement, it's going to need to do at least an order of magnitude more prep work before launching. We've already seen what we get when somebody puts up a plain git server, and we've seen when a single company extends it to become social with a proprietary, non-distributed model.
A better future requires much, much more up-front work.
Well played, universe.
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
A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.
Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).
It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.
Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.
Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)
https://github.com/ljtn/epiq