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Ghostty is leaving GitHub

mitchellh.com

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Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#451

Post by fnordpiglet »

gen220 wrote: post #348
fabiensanglard wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. According to the current metric (87.25% uptime), github suffers a partial outage 3h/day. https://onlineornot.com/uptime-calculator/87.25

In their defense, they dramatically "over"-report sev-2/3's (things like, avatar urls are not loading in saudi arabia), which makes their cumulative uptime look much worse than it is. If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's. https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copi…

Two 9’s? You have to work pretty hard to do that badly. That’s like bragging you graduated with a C average from Harvard after your father endowed a chair to get you in.

Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#452

Post by shrinks99 »

infogulch wrote: post #262

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…

tangled.org writes issues as atproto data that lives in a user's PDS which is one neat idea.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#453

Post by charcircuit »

nerdypepper wrote: post #248
charcircuit wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a tangled account doesn't solve the problem of needing an account on those other forges. You just added one more account someone needs to make.

maybe, but tangled knots actually federate. you could contribute to repos on knot.ghostty.org and knot.tangled.org with the same account. no other platform permits one identity across instances.

But that requires people to buy into that no different from requiring other people to buy in to uploading to gitlab or some other alternative.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#454

Post by margalabargala »

idan wrote: post #415
margalabargala wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

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 i…

I'm glad you are optimistic. GitHub will need employees with that attitude if they're going to pull out of their current trajectory.

To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#455

Post by 30minAdayHN »

hexis wrote: post #152
devin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm 13936 and I felt like I was SO LATE to the party when I signed up.

Hello late bloomers, 143370 here

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#456

Post by ks2048 »

I think this Twitter question and response (from the author) is helpful to understand the problem:

Question:

So, I'm also annoyed wit GitHub's stability (especially lately), but I'm curious: Ghostty has only a handful of PRs per day (excluding robot contribs); how is this a real problem? (and yes, I read your blog article).

Response:

1) The robot contribs don't auto-close if GH is down (cause it relies on GHA). We have retries but its pretty annoying.

(2) A PR isn't one and done. We need to comment, we need to run tests (~80 per run), and we do this multiple times per commit (due to review back and forth). So one PR has a lot of GH reliance right now.

(3) PRs tend to batch up, e.g. we don't do PR review constantly because all of us have other things to do, so we usually will try to review/merge multiple at one time. 3 PRs per day = 20 per week, which is a ton for volunteer time!

(4) We try to coordinate merge parties across maintainers in China+US+EU and if GH is down during our small time slice we just can't do any meaningful merging for 24 hours. We could alter our process here but that's just gaslighting.

(5) We get an order of magnitude more issue and discussion comments, which are affected by all of the above except CI. These are particularly affected by GHA/API outages.

(6) Dev work by maintainers happens in non-PR branches that run CI, and if CI is down we can't test our code (since Ghostty relies on a lot of testing we can't run locally, e.g. for platforms we don't have). It effectively pauses work on that branch.

(7) I've had multiple days in that 30-day window where Git operations themselves failed for different reasons. So I couldn't push a branch or whatever.

It just all adds up to be WAY too work impacting. The Ghostty maintainer channel is a stream of "oh GH is down again."

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#457

Post by jitl »

_doctor_love wrote: post #267
bsimpson wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like MS went out of its way to make a point that GitHub and NPM would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money. It was positioned as a benevolent acquisition for the good of the development community. As so often happens, that didn't last long. Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand. I'm sure there are countless…

> would be independent orgs that no longer had to worry about making keep-the-lights-on money It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!" Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies. Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of fre…

What do you mean "we keep falling for it"? I remember after the acquisition there were tons of projects that left for Gitlab or other forges on principle of boycotting Microsoft. And for the many who stayed on Github, we still got about 6 years of pretty great free services before reliability really started to decline.

And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#458

Post by mreid »

devin wrote: post #129
idan wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jo…

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.

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.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#459

Post by mmooss »

idan wrote: post #96
mitchellh wrote: post #26

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…

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 jo…

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.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#460

Post by BizarroLand »

pc86 wrote: post #195
BizarroLand wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When is the "get better" step? I've only ever seen two things happen mid- or post-enshittification: 1. The company builds a moat and just remains shit. 2. New entrants either displace the company entirely (most likely) or competition slows the enshittification process (distant second) or reverses it (almost never). It's not clear to me why "get shitty" is a necessary step to this. What part of GitHub's executives' gr…

The enshittification process milks the current product of all of the money that can be wrung from it by any means just shy of immolation.

Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.

That's why "get shitty" is necessary.

When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.

It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.

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