alt Hacker NewsGhostty is leaving GitHub
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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.
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.
The thing you love has been bought by Microsoft. When things belong to a large corporation, they can (and probably will) drift off in some absurd direction, because in a way, the relationship is reversed. The thing no longer serves you; instead, the brand, the user base, the reputation, and the key role and function of the thing are put at the service of investors. In this process, you are demoted from subject to object; from an animal grazing on open grasslands to an animal grazing in a fenced-in pasture to an animal standing in a stall and being fed compressed pellets that contain bone meal from its own species for nutritional value. That’s why it’s important not to walk into the fences too naively, even if the grass there is fresh and lush.
During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
>It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.
Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.
this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.
Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.
> 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)
What do we think is more to blame for GitHub's massive decrease in quality? I've heard the following theories:
1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.
2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.
Perhaps it's a bit of both.
Aside from outages, what really bothers me lately about GH is how slow the "app" actually is. Keeping a tab open on a PR status check burns 25-30% of a core on my cpu even when it's hidden. Reviewing large PRs has an awful workflow. Almost every diff page I load starts with "there's nothing here" then starts to load...
Reading the write-up again, this really struck me:
It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.
Github is really Microsoft. The above paragraph captures perfectly what it's like to work in a big company like Microsoft.
When Github was a startup, it was both a tech company and a social media for coders and a real-life social scene (especially in SF, some pretty epic stories over the years).
Once Github was acquired, it was a countdown to all the soul being sucked out of it and simply a mechanism being left behind.
I'm happy that raw git + mailing lists works great for the linux project, but can the rest of us all agree we actually do need issues & PRs? And that it's super painful to lose all this context when platform hopping, or when the service unilaterally decides to deplatform someone?
So where are we going? Mitchell will be deciding for Ghostty. If github's current trajectory is anything to go by, everyone else will need to decide where to go sooner rather than later.
I'm worried that it will be a Babel scattering event and this open source superpower that github catalyzed (how to describe it?) will just evaporate.
I'm also worried that wherever we go next could have the same fate as github.
So what then? Radicle is the only thing that I've seen that could theoretically 'solve' the problem, though it still needs a lot of work: https://radicle.dev/
> I know I work at GitHub so that might sound heretical, but I promise it’s not controversial for me to say it. Very few people internally believe that PRs and issues are ideal primitives for the future of engineering. And there are a lots of us inside the machine exploring what comes next.
From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
I'm very interested in where ghostty ends up - I wonder if they'll follow Zig to Codeberg?
It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!
There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.
This seems like a great opportunity for new platforms who are rethinking the OSS space to finally gain the traction they need to be effective. For a collaborative platform, quantity is key, and I am hopeful that someone who is interested in advancing the software space will become the new go-to. This isn't to say that GitHub hasn't been innovating, but at least from my perspective, the way we've used git for the past however-many-years has remained basically constant.
Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
I don’t know if it’s production ready yet, but tangled.org is a really interesting take on a forge and I’ve been watching it for a while. It decentralizes the centralized parts of GitHub in a pretty neat way. The biggest problem with forges that aren’t GitHub is people need to make and manage all these different accounts for each place they contribute (which almost certainly will lower the amount of people who do. Maybe this is a good thing these days though...)
Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.
Is it a joke? GitHub is not perfect, but it is mostly free and survives billions of commits every day. You don’t think We are all able to scale a service so well.
I don’t know, I love it. There are many alternatives like bitbucket, gitlab, but GitHub is still better overall.
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 migrated my entire workflow onto a personal GitLab instance after the whole "pay a fee to bring your own bags to the grocery store" GitHub Actions pricing shenanigans earlier this year.
Best decision ever.
100% uptime. 100% less stress with each of the product/pricing changes over the past few months.
Was also able to build my own GitHub Copilot equivalent that auto-reviews MRs interactively.
Highly recommend it.
I know gitea / forgejo will be a popular suggestion, either self-hosted or via something like Codeberg. Despite also being a GitHub user since 2010 and also "doomscrolling" issues for projects I am involved in, I do host a gitea for personal projects where I don't need the GitHub network effect. It works well and is surprisingly capable!
Having said that, I stumbled upon this curious blog post about a security issues in Forgejo: https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html
GitHub lost its way right around the time it was bought by a large corporate entity.
Had they remained independent I have no doubt it'd be a very different story.
I wonder if radicle.xyz will start taking off, as there is no corporate entity hanging over its head, and never likely will be.
I wonder if this is related to the pretty serious security incident about Github which got published today:
https://x.com/sagitz_/status/2049153195243372569
With malicious HTTP headers, any user could access any repo on Github.com, or on the Enterprise Github instance they might have access to. It's even worse than that because it's remote code execution on the Github server.
It seems like Github has been a mess since the Microsoft acquisition. Definitely feels like another multi billion dollar screwup in the making, like Skype or Nokia were.
Hopefully the incidents in the last few weeks are a wakeup call, and they start getting their shit together.
What is confusing to me, is as a business I would happily pay GitHub for many many features that I pay others for. Maybe MS thinks its just a billion here, billion there, but isn't it so easy to capture these?
1. faster more configureable action runtimes so I can get faster builds 2. usable merge queues because the github one is a joke 3. some reasonable CI management and workflow debugging features
It was four years ago that GitHub had major enough outages with their database that they had to issue a press release (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...). Five months ago I was actually still recommending GitHub. Then a month ago I left the platform, because I couldn't get shit done anymore.
The alternatives aren't great. If any VCs wanna send a couple hundred grand my way, I'd be willing to start a GitHub alternative, if only so I could have a not-crappy place to host my own repos.
As a European user of github I've only had one two occasions of it being down. I guess we can just be lucky it got a better uptime while we are awake
Not to defend Github, but I sometimes feel there are two Githubs that aren't related to each other.
> This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day
Do people seriously experience outage every day? I really don't know... it always has been feeling like a once-per-six-month thing. Do people have extremely complex Actions that I can't fathom?
> When I went through tough breakups? I lost myself in open source... on GitHub. During college at 4 AM when everyone is passed out? Let me get one commit in. During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub. It's where I've historically been happiest and wanted to be.
I've never had such an obsession to a platform or an activity as this. Some might say this is unhealthy, but I admire folks who can reach this level of obsession in their craft. It's just a joy to read about for me
Luke Wroblewski posted this earlier today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lukew_small-taste-of-the-inco...
The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.
If Github were shut down, it would feel even worse than if Hacker News was shot down. I am github user 1520. Signed up a just few days after Mithcel on february 2008. I remember the early days sitting in a hotel lobby next to Chris Wanstrath and discussing a bug I found on github. Not ready to do the switch yet.
I remember visiting GitHub's downtown SF HQ sometime around 2014 or so... it was soon after they closed their first significant funding round, and years before they were purchased by MS. I had a friend who worked there as a very early employee. I was at IBM at the time doing AI stuff.
I remember saying to myself, "every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck...
A year or two later they had that public "me-too" snafu (years before me-too) that led to a founder's resignation, a whole bunch of other people leaving, and then Microsoft acquiring the company. I wondered back then, is this the end of the company?
Perhaps so, but perhaps not... Here we are, 8 years the acquisition, only now lamenting a slow demise. That's a nice run for a startup acquired by a behemoth enterprise software company. With the exception of Redhat (which is debatable,) IBM had no ability to keep a software acquisition's culture, verve, or ability alive past a year or two.
This is not the large ElasticSearch outage they had on April 27, 2026. This blog post was written a week before that, so this was a different outage.
I have nothing to add to this. Comedy gold.
It is sad to see how far GitHub has fallen. Will also be interesting to where mitchellh takes the project, I imagine codeberg and sources are possibilities.
I looked up my own ID and GitHub join date from the API, all the way back in 2009: https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster
I feel this. :/ It also just reminds me of everything we've lost in tech since the 2010s. When I used to put Octocat and Google stickers on my laptop and go to conferences every year and everyone was so optimistic and vibrant.
Mitchell on what he'd do if he was in charge of GitHub:
People suggesting git bug and other solutions miss one important part that also makes GitHub sticky: They have an app, being able to look at issues on your phone, getting notifications and being able to review things there is worth a lot.
User 2882 here. What I know is that once a mass exodus occurs from service A to service B, the issues of service A that led people to leave it for service B will start to appear in service B as well.
On a much smaller scale (niche personal projects), I'm also planning to leave Github (probably for a local forgejo or even gitweb).
The vast majority of features GH offers are of no use to me. In fact, in the age of vibe coding, zero-friction drive-by contributions are a net negative. The UX has been steadily dropping for years. The recent abysmal record in availability and bugs is just the last drop in the bucket.
The writing was on the wall the day they were acquired. They had a good run, but those days are long over.
Really feel this. Along with group chat (irc), GitHub is the best form of social networking I’ve ever experienced. It’s how my co-founder and I first connected some 6-7 years ago. It’s the real LinkedIn for devs, where the posting activity is the work itself, rather than posting about the work. A truly magical place, while it lasted.
> past month I’ve kept a journal where I put an “X” next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work2. Almost every day has an X
Is it really this bad?
I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
The downfall of GitHub is sad, having a centralized way to find cool open source software is amazing. I use the feed of what people I'm following are starring, tags and code search to find amazing and interesting projects, and I'm afraid I'll be missing out on great but hidden software since there is fragmentation when people leave GitHub.
And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)
Everyone should have abandoned ship sooner, namely when they were consuming content for Copilot without permission. When it became obvious that pushing your code to GitHub meant giving it directly to Microsoft I stopped using it altogether and ran my own git/gitlab/gitea (I've changed approaches several times).
> During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub.
I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.
You're not alone. At my company, we're now making plans to self-host our Git and CICD. I probably can't sell them on Gitea+Drone or Forgejo or another open-source solution (even though it'd suit us well), but we're still going to find a solution that isn't dependent on someone else's platform not sucking.
Have not had such big outage issues as what's described here, although I have noticed more stability issues lately. Is this worse while Europe is sleeping maybe?
The writing was already on the wall when MS required logins to search code just 48 hours after acquisition
Outages aside, I have not put any serious work (of mine) on Github since it came out that they trained CoPilot on everyone's code without any sort of opt-in or details about how licenses were honored. I moved all my code, and I stopped doing the Hacktoberfests as I realized their incentive to have us all do it. All the good will I felt participating in FOSS was lost almost instantly. I still make FOSS and still participate in other's projects where I can, but I host my own stuff elsewhere.
Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives
There's probably a few more to be added there now.
GitHub needs a Sonos moment, after they launched their failed new app that made everyone angry and leave they got a new person in and I've seen them actively respond to issues on BlueSky with honest responses and not corporate fluff ever since while also turning the ship around.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...
Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
Come to the Gnu Savannah (jk) strange to see so many projects moving off GitHub. I always used gitlab, and only grudgingly had a GitHub, because that is where every project was. So while seeing people move off GitHub validates my choice to not personally invest in it, I can’t help but be a little sad that We are splitting across the different git providers.
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.