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Ghostty is leaving GitHub

mitchellh.com

571–580 of 1001 posts

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#571

I migrated my entire workflow onto a personal GitLab instance after the whole "pay a fee to bring your own bags to the grocery store" GitHub Actions pricing shenanigans earlier this year. Best decision ever. 100% uptime. 100% less stress with each of the product/pricing changes over the past few months. Was also able to build my own GitHub Copilot equivalent that auto-reviews MRs interactively. Highly recommend it.

Is GitLab pretty good these days? I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.

I had steered away for a long while thinking it was subpar to GitHub, but it's really come a long way. Especially running it on a local network it's noticeably faster in every way than GitHub, and I'm able to build complex gitlab workflows with custom runners that are fully configurable and have effectively 100% uptime and no queues.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#572
post #219
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

I'm also surprised. I'm user 34967 and I was pretty far from Silicon Valley when I joined in late 2008.

Where are you finding your join number on GitHub? I just spent a few minutes looking at my profile and settings, but I don't see it anywhere.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#573

> To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc. A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers. Other VCSes like fossil store issue…

Even if you only used raw git with GitHub, it still wouldn't work. Pushing changes from my laptop would fail for hours when their SSO would break.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insider perspective on this I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game. Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on.…

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…

GitHub was independent, and then AI happened.

All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#575
post #415

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…

Speaking of a "year of Linux on desktop", it's mostly not happening because the desktop lock-in has largely eased. I of course love my Linux desktop, but I use relatively few native applications, and every one of them is multiplatform now. Windows desktop becomes less and less relevant in its own way, by degradation of experience, and by being replaced with consoles and the Steam Deck.

Same may happen to GitHub. CI/CD tools and workflows can become more portable and adaptable. Independent code review tools that can use GitHub API along with a few other APIs may become popular. GitHub will become one of, not the one. I won't call it a bad outcome.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#576
I remember visiting GitHub's downtown SF HQ sometime around 2014 or so... it was soon after they closed their first significant funding round, and years before they were purchased by MS. I had a friend who worked there as a very early employee. I was at IBM at the time doing AI stuff.

I remember saying to myself, "every single meeting room and common area in this building is designed around the consumption of alcohol--the long bar downstairs, the meeting room modeled after an airport lounge, the meeting room modeled after a smoking club, the meeting room / roof deck...

A year or two later they had that public "me-too" snafu (years before me-too) that led to a founder's resignation, a whole bunch of other people leaving, and then Microsoft acquiring the company. I wondered back then, is this the end of the company?

Perhaps so, but perhaps not... Here we are, 8 years the acquisition, only now lamenting a slow demise. That's a nice run for a startup acquired by a behemoth enterprise software company. With the exception of Redhat (which is debatable,) IBM had no ability to keep a software acquisition's culture, verve, or ability alive past a year or two.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#577

> I know I work at GitHub so that might sound heretical, but I promise it’s not controversial for me to say it. Very few people internally believe that PRs and issues are ideal primitives for the future of engineering. And there are a lots of us inside the machine exploring what comes next. From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/

Honestly the arrogance of their workers are truly astounding. It also tracks that someone with little software experience would become GitHub's staff research engineer. Truly a massive signal that we can't let these companies lead the direction of tech in our country.

I’m Maggie and I’m a staff research engineer at GitHub Next. At least that’s my title, but I’m actually a designer. Or I was, back when that was still a separate thing to engineering.

Ah. I didn't think we could debase the title of "engineer" any further, and yet here we are.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#578

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…

I am an early GitHub user with low 6 digit user ID (joined around 2011 with a two letter handle). I approve Mitchell's message.

It's been painful to use GitHub these days, user experience practically went down the toilet with ridiculous pains like CVEs [1][2], slow and ineffective and expensive GitHub Actions that doesn't allow local execution instead a "push & pray" workflow leading to repetitive "commit-push-wait" cycles to debug CI errors or bugs and then the absolutely horrendous Arkose Lab's Octocaptcha[3][4]. Note that only new users are encountering the Octocaptcha at account creation time, the amount of the time I wasted on solving these ridiculous visual or audio captchas are insane. I happened to need to create 3 separate accounts for the orgs that I am consulting for recently, each time it was at least 20-30 minutes to go through the account creation process. Sure it blocks some AI bots, but can't GitHub team create something that doesn't hinder the user experience?! Oh, if you have uBlock Origin or Privacy Guard on (which I did), it will take longer because each failed answer will set you back for another 5-10 mins of puzzle time!

Plus the reliability issues that Mitchell mentioned. Mona the Octocat jumped the shark in 2026. RIP.

[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/github-rce-vulnerability-cve-2026-38... [2] https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/trivy-security-scanner-git... [3] https://octocaptcha.com [4] https://share.google/aimode/2KOowSozTuZJVhBLw

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#579
post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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". This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring…

I joined a startup 3 years ago as employe 6. everyone was using windows but I was used to working with macos so I got a mac.

Took a year till everyone was using a Mac.

Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub

#580
post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.

I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you
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