alt Hacker NewsGhostty is leaving GitHub
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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.
Those footnotes - "no, not that outage" - are damning.
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...
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?
>I've felt this way for a long time, but for the 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.
I must be a filthy casual because I'm sure I can count on one hand the number of times a Github outage has affected my work.
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.
Meta-observation: GitHub's quality is so bad that Mitchell has to clarify in his writeup which recent outage he is talking about!!!
All this because Microsoft won't sunset the crap that is Azure and rebuild something reliable from ground up. GitHub survived on Ruby On Rails - which was notorious for being slow at scale back then - and still managed to have better uptime than all the execs at Microsoft managed to do so far since its acquisition. What a shame.
Probably relevant: https://github.com/ianchanning/awesome-github-alternatives
There's probably a few more to be added there now.
From a security perspective, centralization cuts both ways.
Large platforms like GitHub have strong security teams and fast patching, but they also concentrate risk. A single vulnerability or abuse pattern can affect a huge portion of the ecosystem.
Decentralizing critical infrastructure doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it.
What It Means for Open Source, Infrastructure and Security: https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183
>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.
Was hoping to see a point about full-on chutzpah at training AI without any consent on all code uploaded to GitHub, but alas.
Too negligible a problem. Service outages are much more important issues, and much less controversial.
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.
GitHub has been stagnant for so many years now. There was an extremely brief period where it was actually good and innovative at the same time.
They've started shipping stuff again, but it's mostly not stuff I want.
Is there any service left that will just host your git and offer issues and PRs without cramming anything else down your throat, especially automated help, LLM based or not?
Ideally with private repos for free or a modest fee.
Gitea doesn't count because they only want to sell hosting to large organizations. The pre MS github model for private repos was just fine(tm).
This was good for me to read. I'm still on GitHub, but think about moving more frequently than I'd like to
Github has been all right for me because I don't do too much collaboration and I prefer not having to worry about the security implications. But it just struck me that I have my own infrastructure on Tailscale. I could probably just use Github as an alternate remote and use my own infrastructure to store the code. I imagine a gix + axum + maud should be able to give me my own git web host.
The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.
I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!
There's clearly opportunity for a GitHub replacement that can operate reliably at scale.
I support Forgejo and Codeberg, but it's not clear that its architecture can scale to GitHub levels.
Microsoft subsidises a lot of OSS development. Who has equally big pockets?
I think GitHub has completely lost the plot over the last year or so, I don't think the stuff I work on will leave any time soon but I'm slowly losing my patience with github.
The other week I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my actions jobs were just stuck on waiting and not starting.
For my personal stuff, I think I'm going to migrate to either my own selfhosted instance of something like gitea or codeberg, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore imo for GitHub, even with stuff like free runners and pages.
I personally think this is mainly attributed to GH Copilot and I would love to know if MS/GH even makes a profit on it.
From FreeBSD to Windows 2000: Microsoft’s Painful Hotmail Migration
I really like forgejo, but for OSS it's a complete no-no unless they want to manage PRs by email. Maintaining a forgejo instance and allowing anyone to join is a recipe for headaches. Until forgejo figures out the federation aspect (allow to send PRs from other forgejo instances, or some other distributed way), it will be hard for OSS to adopt them and keep the collaboration aspect.
Do not forget: "Embrace AI or get out!"
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...
> I'll share more details about where the Ghostty project will be moving to in the coming months
So in response to GitHub Issues, PRs, etc. being occasionally inaccessible each day, you're going to make them inaccessible for months?
Feels like a knee-jerk emotional decision, one that doesn't serve you, Ghostty, or the community.
At least have your backup ready to go
Github is Microsoft. Nothing more needs to be said, and all of Microsofts products and services must be avoided like the plague they are. A lot of young people have not had the "pleasure" of dealing with Microsoft historically, when open source was a cancer, so I understand why they make the same mistakes that people did in the 90s and 00s.
A remnant of the old GitHub still remains, try surfing to a non-existing repositor like https://github.com/NowIsTheTimeForAllGoodMenToComeToTheAidOf...
(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)
github failure is a live lesson of dysfunctional org. A business unit like github need a CEO.
GitHub literally getting ghosted
why not just setting up github enterprise? i mean it's still an infra to take care but if you are willing to pay for it, you may as well? from my experience the other git forge doesnt provide the same feature sets and api as github, like gitlab ci is actually pretty limited compared to GHA, there is no concept of github apps for other providers too, but maybe you just want a code hosting..
Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.
I read this and felt like I was reading a moltbook post.
Am I an agent? Are you?
Is Claude... God?
I do hope something good comes out of it with new platforms competing to refine, innovate, and iterate on git hosting and the UX of it all.
Im still waiting for... Basically anyone that has used TFS (what microsoft had/pushed before acquiring github) to do a similar post, detailing how they miss the tool original concept. I'm sitting down, don't worry about me.
Help me out here because I honestly don't know / must have a different workflow.
Are other people being impacted every day by github outages?
What does that look like?
I'm not saying the writer is wrong, I'm just wondering how folks who experience this every day work / how that exposure plays out / what it is.
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 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
Is there anything less important than the origin URL of a Git repository?
This comment doesn't add anything novel to the discussion, but is worth adding I think because hubbers and MSFT folks read HN - I too am evaluating leaving personally. Professionally, we're talking about it loosely, and if it continues it will become an increasing likelihood.
Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833
https://api.github.com/users/<username>
Is "migration to azure" or "microsoft acquisition" a cause or a symptom?
I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.
Yes, I love their daily UX optimisations like showing issues comments in time ascending and having to click read more several times to get to latest comments. Each and every time.
GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
One of the issues is that Github competes with Azure Devops, and MS prefers to push Azure.
It's odd. I've been having the same feeling as well. Earlier this week, they sent that email about copilot, which I don't use but pay $10 a month for and I canceled my subscription.
Microsoft truly is the reverse King Midas!
just use https://onedev.io/ !
best dev platform
I guess these outages are the outcome of attempts to replace engineers with AI at GitHub.
Other companies considering similar things should take note.
Related: Vibe Coding Will Break Your Company https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47930738
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).