Comment by mitchellh
17 hours ago
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.
Hi there! Longtime fan and hubber here.
It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)
My version of your post reads differently:
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'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's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It'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's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
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'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'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't care if they were making it worse, if it advanced their other goals.
This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.
It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It'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.
Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".
Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1]
Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.
[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368
I'd honestly argue the opposite. Staying with an abusive partner is not likely to resolve the abuse, no matter how much you think so.
Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
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I do work at GitHub. I shared the above as a nuanced "yes and" to the pain that Mitchell is feeling.
In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".
My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.
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> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better.
It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term.
So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.
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Sure it does. Users who continually push for the right features, stress test things (under normal circumstances), demonstrate uses of the platform that could be baked in by default, etc. are all highly valuable to everyone. And the social aspect matters too, even if GitHub really isn't a "social coding" site anymore. If great people doing OSS stuff are all on various GitHub projects, that encourages more good people to do good OSS stuff.
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> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.
It does not deserve to get better.
It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn'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's code.
Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]
GitHub shouldn'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] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...
I used to think people who said Github had become very unreliable were exagerating, but I can't miss it now. If you want to keep people, you have to actually go down less.
It'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?)
Did Heroku ever actively degrade? Seems more like it was neglected until the competition eclipsed it entirely. What GitHub is doing seems worse, like true active regression.
Salesforce never understood Heroku. Salesforce's understanding of Heroku, if such an understanding ever existed, was wildly different than what Heroku understood it wanted to be. Benioff's penchant for buying himself a company every year did not help — "no headcount this year, we're buying Mulesoft/Quip/Tableau/Slack/$WHATEVER. And oops we spent too much money on dreamforce. Sucks that your pager rotations are burning people out!" It was very clear they did not give a shit about us, as evidenced by resources.
It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.
GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.
Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
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If anyone reading this is curious of their own, you can go to https://api.github.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE and fetch it.
My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.
Fun story about that: In Ruby 2.x, the version GitHub originally launched with, every object implemented the method `id`, which returned the object id (in 3.x, it was renamed to `object_id`). Every object had this id, ActiveRecord models, strings, floats, integers, booleans, etc. Some objects had fixed object ids, like `true.object_id #=> 20`, `false.object_id #=> 0`, `123.object_id #=> 247 (2n+1)`. The `object_id` for `nil` is `4`.
Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.
The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:
Now, if there was some bug, and for some reason a comment had no author, `comment.author` would return `nil`, `nil.id` would return `4`, and the UI would show Yehuda as the author in the UI. People would ask, "Who is this Yehuda guy, and why is he commenting on my PRs?"
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1,202 if we're bragging.
TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.
Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.
I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.
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Surprised to find I am #79.
I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.
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Mine is 2041.
When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)
I never thought about it before then.
I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.
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Thanks for sharing that link. My GitHub ID is 484.
I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.
Genuinely surprised to be just over 10k too! Felt late!
No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.
I was late to the party: 457,207
Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.
https://api.github.com/users/steveadams
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Genuinely surprised that I'm only 2,187. Weird to think about how quickly I must have jumped on it.
My user id is in the 2,660,000s, 2012 here and I joined when I was 13.
hah, my cheat here is https://github.com/YOURHANDLE.png
Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D
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I can't believe I joined Github back in 2009. I was a hardcore Mercurial fan and user back then. :)
April 27th 2010 and I felt pretty good getting a five character name (my own name). My ID is 254XXX
10126 here. I wouldn't have guessed it was that low.
Around 40000 and a real name with 4 digits. Thought I was late.
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Woah, January 2009 (in the 40,000s), like some others I felt I was late to the party. I guess not :).
And here I thought I was doing well at 47979. That was January 2009, so not too bad.
wow, I'm in the 6.3 million group, 2014. I am surprised it's both that low and that old. Nothing compared to 5 or 6 digits, though. :D
Thanks for the link.
ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26
17 years, a month and two days ago.
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Nice, mine is 5082
133882 / Oct 1st 2009
You're going to crash the server.
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926648 checking in.
I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:
366; nbd
https://api.github.com/users/nullstyle
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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't care (or don't know).
If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
The issue is that modern software businesses aren't encouraged, in the slightest, to care about polishing products.
The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.
This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.
The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.
The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
I think it's true that lacking sufficient numbers in power is essential for change, but I also think there is a lack of people who give a shit. I've had many 1-on-1 conversations, some lunch casual and some more directly syncing on a project, wherein we'd come to straightforward conclusions on next steps. And then we'd have full team meetings to make official decisions and I'd find myself alone asking questions about a leader's out of the blue contradicting proposals. I'm not sure how one functions in this (I guess typical?) environment.
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/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman'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 "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
What'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's and I'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're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.
So I'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'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?
> In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'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.
Decentralized networks benefit from hubs if they benefit a subset of the network, which GitHub has for a long time. A hub is a focal point and there can (and should be) many of them in the git "network."
Shrug
Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!
In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.
Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
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looks like you work at github.
I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
I don’t think they were trying to hide that - they said they’re a “hubber” at the top. Maybe not obvious, but not obfuscated.
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Github is Microsoft, who even cares? How can ppl be so caught up in a brand name? Microsoft doesn't care about you, why do you care about Microsoft? Things always change, just move on when the time is right.
And it's just a host of git, you can just jump platforms...
This is like crying that your favourite IRC network goes, then you just jump onto OFTC
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I found out today that I am user 6082. I have been using github since the rubyconf (railsconf? I can'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's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
> t's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale
Besides "That's what makes us money and pays my bills", 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 "engineers" that keeps overindexing on Efficiency at the cost of Resiliency, it will feel like this pile of unusable crap
"Stick around to make it better", exclaimed the abusive partner.
github hasn't absorbed agentic coding, though. agentic coding has absorbed it, and as a result it'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.
Decentralized version control only works if there is some way to find and access those distributed repositories. For many reasons and no matter the tech there is always a drift towards having a centralized registry so that the degrees of separation for individual actors is minimised. Be that a search engine or code forge or social network.
For *most* users, fully distributed and disconnected is a bug not a feature.
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I didn't know this was a sport. I'm GitHub user 43053 :-)
As someone with the ID 1653, I've totally given up on the thing. I've even created my own rust based forge, ironically, hosted on github at the moment.
This is called brand loyalty, and it's one of the first thing they'll abuse.
The avalanche has already begun. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.
Yeah, be careful not to gaslight yourself into trying to "tough it out" with bad vendor relationships. Sometimes you do need to know when things aren't good/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's Heroku moment.
Considering the size and scale of Github, do you feel like it's become closer to an infrastructural public good rather than a privately owned product?
The amount of impact I'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.
Caveat, I'm not a lawyer, I don't speak for the company, yadda yadda
It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.
I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
git is an infrastructural public good. github is a company that sells you git adjacent services.
Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
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I appreciate that you'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'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're all counting on you.
(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
As Albert Hirschman observed in reflecting on his seminal "Exit, Loyalty and Voice": "an organization needs minimal, or floor, levels of exit and voice in order to receive the necessary feedback about its performance".
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
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.
Github isn't a public good or a person; it'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'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.
> Occam's razor applies here
I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren'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.
I fully agree with your points but have to mention that market capitalization is not money available to the company. Microsoft is valued over a trillion dollars at the stock market, Microsoft doesn't "have" a trillion dollars they can spend.
huh, I've never thought to check my github id. I don't remember myself being an early adopter.
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 :)
Fyi your HN description still says Heroku
derp, haven't touched that in a while. TY!
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
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.
Holy crap, just found out I am 1371. Wow.
I'm wondering now how the heck we ended up so early on Github. It was back then just a small unknown startup but i'm not sure what connection we first 30,000 users share. At the same time i remember there must have been also some connection to Y Combinator back in 2008. Is there a way to see my own history of probably first commits or activity on Github? Oh, i found out. It was the early Rails Community on Github. That's probably what the first Github Users all share in common.
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fuck microsoft. it absolutely is the big badness of that monster. microsoft'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.
You sound like you just want to make the world a better place /s
github is their precious. i’ve heard it called that name before, though not by them /G
shrug, I can't fix a lot of things in our reality, but I'd love to leave software development in a better state than when I found it
Hi, tangential but your post mentions only two pronouns when the recent trend is to mention 3 out of respect for gender fluid people who often use slight deviations in the third pronoun as an indication of their fluidity. Hope you do better
First, a reminder of the guidelines: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
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I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
This quote from the post resonated with me:
> 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.
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?
Microsoft, Greed, Outsourcing to low-cost-countries who couldn't care less and rotate entire dev teams on you every few months or so, etc...
No AI needed at all. Only humans.
I suspect it isn't even really "greed". It is just the slow mold growth of an org chart optimizing comfort for itself instead of value for customers. Generally, startups / founders are the only anti-bodies against this type of behavior.
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What should we do? The only thing I can think of is to stay vocal about it. Never accept enshittification. Always point things out when they suck.
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The harsh reality, but now it is humans using AI agents which is why we cannot have nice things.
> 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'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.
That isn’t it. If you think bad weather and a flu is something to be scared of, try imagining what several thousand hydrogen bombs would do.
We can't really change the tide lest we be King Cnut - but we can at least take the time and effort in the things we do to fight against entropy - bring more order and durability into our lives.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
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> I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" 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'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.
The difference here is _creative_ work vs consumption. Craftspeople like Mitchell feel passionately about the tools they rely on to build. Github has also been a social place for builders.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
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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.
React gets blamed for this because the error handling is bad and the UX is confusing. But the issue with GitHub’s frontend is that the backend is dropping requests. When you click a button on GitHub and the loader gets stuck that’s because there no timeout/error handling in the JavaScript but there also no reply from the server. I feel like React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
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This is surprising to me, I would have bet money that all the people who actively engage in this type of language/framework war discourse were all drawing Social Security by now.
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Enshittification has become the winning strategy for companies. If you don’t enshittify you will lose.
Fully agree. We really should punish companies that blatantly push this kind of mercenarism. I mean, every VP and CxO join a company, he/she takes super short-sighted decisions that push some random metric a bit up, and then they leave with a huge performance bonus not caring if everything is worse. They won't be around to cope with the fallout as they are already in another company doing the same.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
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This is my darkly optimistic take on enshittification:
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
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It's move fast and break things.
I can't help but think it's a bit more complicated than that.
GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
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>what in the world is going on?
AI slop code
I disagree. Microsoft had been doing just fine at making completely awful and broken products before AI coding was a thing.
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I think it's more people are checked out (and AI is one part of it yes), made worse by orgs who don't know how to lead/manage/change effectively.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
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Deeper than that, but likely also that.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
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Managers now try to "extract value" quickly, leaving ruins behind them and not caring about the future as the immediate payouts allow them to stick to the "F*k you, I got mine!" paradigm.
It's slop from both sides, they're pretty obviously slopping their move to Azure, and at the same time being slammed with a Cambrian explosion of slop repositories.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
AI slop is downstream of enshittification
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>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 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", 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's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
> Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era?
I take it you're agreeing with the sentiment since you had to go back 40-50 years to make your point.
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(Needless) complexity is going on.
KISS and you sleep better.
That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" 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 "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
After yesterday's outage they admitted that their elasticsearch index for issues/prs lost data.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
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What? React has nothing to do with current state of affairs. In fact, React on GitHub currently exists in mere islands, i.e. in Projects and recently in Pull Requests. Most of the frontend is still Web Components[1] paired with Turbo[2] for hot reloading. GitHub is still as slow even with JavaScript disabled, try it yourself. Backend just serves stuff really slow. In fact, there is an alternative GitHub frontend (no affiliation) that feels snappier and is written in React.[3]
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...
[2] see html source for tags
[3] https://my.githero.app/
[4] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
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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.
18 years is a good run as far as these things go.
I don't think it's nostalgia or rosy retrospection. The youths never experienced the old, magical internet. All they get is algorithmic hell.
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's had for 40 years is almost at its end
The 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.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy
I do recall this meme and I empathize with him and also Mitchell above. It's annoying for people to not understand your feelings or make fun of them especially if they're reflections on years past.
Anyone who makes fun of you for feeling things probably isn't anyone you want to listen to, anyway.
Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this
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 !
Better yet don't write the post at all until you actually do something.
"I'm going to become a vegetarian" vibes.
> 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).
No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.
> 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.
I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal.
For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.
There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.
I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/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've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).
KDE's hard-switch to Wayland broke so many things in my workflows, from what used to be a perfect system. For keyboard expansions espansso/ydotools crash bi-hourly and I couldn't pinpoint the source, clipboard sharing between applications doesn'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...
Gnome. If you liked Gnome 2, by now you're crushed. At least you can use Mate Desktop.
Well yeah, and there is KDE 3 which was awesome. But for most of the projects their point stands.
Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you'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's hosted. Best of luck!
So true! This quote from the blog post really hit me:
> Since then, I'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'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year
How 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's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?
> 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.
So do I. At the same time, GitHub has evolved into a SPOF for the entire software industry. It badly needs some real competition.
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.
> tears hit my keyboard
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.
> Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things.
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.
I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016.
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.
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.
Take care.
I thought you like worked there but with the additional context that you never did, yeah cringe
> 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.
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek
> Nobody should cry over a SaaS
This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.
I 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?
It's probably not GitHub as such, but the associated memories and experiences. You never miss a place, you miss the feeling of happines you had when you were there, or the people you spent time with there.
People get emotional over a car, over a house, over a pet... you could argue for everything it's just a car/house/pet... you can get a new one.
Putting pets in that same category is harsh. Pets are family members, living things that you share a home and good times and experiences with.
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/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 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 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.
I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It'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.
Your emotions are totally valid, and I can empathize. You fell in love with a community that slowly got eroded away and no longer exists.
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.
Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.
Completely understand the work/life/hobby fusion.
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.
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 find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that'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't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.
Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (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.
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.
It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.
If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.
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.
"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I'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'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."
Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing
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.
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.
Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)
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?
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.
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.
You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.
What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?
> I have an unhealthy relationship with it.
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
we can be ai-powered, we can be engineers.
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.
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")
God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow
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?
You mean the AI that might fail and suck every last ounce of entropy or life out the planet and sufficate it? Have you seen the insane amount of natural gas being burned to power it? Obviously I'd love if AI solved its own energy crisis but that hasn't even begun to happen yet. You think it will invent cold fusion? Room temp super conductors? Solar cells past our theoretical limits? Do you realize it's literally being controlled by human greed?
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What’s the next phase? Billionaires manage to seize the means of bunker protection and remote-control the commoners into the wilderness?
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.
Was it the platform or the people? The people would be out there doing things without GitHub and they will be there doing things without GitHub.
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's just MS.
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!
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.
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'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.
I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.
This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-)
"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."
If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I'm very interested to hear about it.
hug
Thank you for your hard work.
> 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.
Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)
You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.
my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.
I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.
Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?
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 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).
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing.
Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.
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.
> 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.
Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.
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.
Dude, get some help
Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?
the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.
"They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."
chill dude
Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn'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't sound crazy anymore.
The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406
Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', 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's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.
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.
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This is not good intentioned, you're a jerk, and it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
> This is not good intentioned
On what are you basing that?
> it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
Yes it is and I didn't claim it wasn't, so this is a strawman.
There's nothing personally indicting about having low testosterone. It's relatively common and it's potentially a serious medical condition. There is no reason to take offense from this.
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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'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'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