Comment by bluehatbrit
6 hours ago
I don't think we're anywhere close to the downfall of GitHub. It'll be a very slow decay.
The fact is, lots of people are very happy using AI tools, and most of those hook straight into GitHub. If AI is driving all this new code, it's only going to make moving away from GitHub more painful.
Businesses I've spoken to hate the idea of moving their code forge. Migrations like that suck and they're expensive. There isn't a meaningful differentiator between the other managed options, so the goal would just be to stand still. Unless GitHub's stability spirals fast I don't see a big wave of businesses leaving.
I say all this as someone who's been moving their code over to their own Forgejo instance. I'm all for more competition and fragmentation in this area, I just don't think it's happening soon.
I’m prob not the “average” user in this context (meaning that I am not a SWE or professional developer, but rather a code-curious sysadmin and consultant with too many hobbies), and I consistently use GitHub Copilot to write and push code to a self-hosted Forgejo…unless it’s a productive fork for contributing, or simply something I don’t want to take up space on my own server, anyway. I agree it’s likely to be a slow decay. GitHub is problematic, but it doesn’t summon the sort of white-hot resentment that pushed people to abandon other platforms en masse.
I am concerned that it will be much more difficult to discover FOSS projects with whatever the new regimes are, similar to how Discord has walled off a great deal of the discussion forums and collaborative groups.
> and most of those hook straight into GitHub. If AI is driving all this new code, it's only going to make moving away from GitHub more painful.
Anecdotal, but we've had success with gitea and having agents use "tea" (gh cli alternative) as a skill. If the cli tool you're asking it to use is similar enough it will use it instead of gh without any (major) issues.
> It'll be a very slow decay
Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.
I think this is true of github as a forge but it faces the threat of unbundling. Off the top of my head
- Code repository
- Project wiki
- Project roadmap/planning
- Static site hosting
- Issue tracking
- Internal and external contributions (PRs)
- Code review
- Cross platform CI pipelines/runners
- Release hosting
Of these key things, what is Github good at and how much can you improve by providing an alternative that's faster/cheaper/more robust?
Of these I think the only thing Github stays competitive at is "code repository." Everything else kinda sucks and/or is expensive and flaky.
Just as an example, there's that hilarious "just give me an EXE" Reddit post from a few years back. It's fun to laugh it given the state/purpose of Github but you can also look at that as a lost market for Github. Why can't you provide a nice landing page with downloads/installers in a very clean landing page for your project on GitHub? It could even be a premium feature if it means paying for storage/bandwidth.
And don't get me started on actions. Absolute trash tier product that they should be ashamed at the state of.