Mitchell is a bellwether.
This is a 'tipping point' situation. Exodus will be a little at a time, then all at once.
Ghostty is leaving GitHub
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#952Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love sourcehut and want to see them succeed, but their build service (despite having some very cool ideas like allowing you to SSH into your build container) is pretty barebones / lacking compared to GH/GitHub actions. You either get no task parallelism (all your tasks are in one manifest) or you get up to N=4 parallelism (you have four manifests). As far as I can tell, you can’t specify job dependencies beyond just…
OTOH, the nice thing about a minimalist build system is it forces you to solve these problems yourself, in a way that’s broadly compatible with any provider: for me, nix builds, cache with cachix, and use gnu parallel for running concurrent jobs. Means that my CI pipeline can be ~instantly moved to any provider, or a box that I own, or whatever.
Yep. I cannot imagine any universe where I'd rather use GitHub Actions than a shell script.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#953Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some years ago I wondered how long will it take them to go they way sourceforge went. Once you grow too much without a proper leader, you will fall :(.
Comparing GitHub and SourceForge as if they were cut from the same cloth is laughable to me. SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
> SF has always been a wretched hive of ads and dark patterns.
No, as others have said it wasn't always that way. And more importantly it's not that way now. But yes, for a while there it was the epitome of enshittication. How that worked out is kinda hopeful in a way: it went broke, was bought out, and went back to being something usable again. In fact they added a lot of enhancements.
I know because I was one of the ones that went back to it. I didn't like having git being forced down my throat, and sourceforge was one of the few left that supports a whole pile of VCSs. I made my Makefiles [0] support it so I didn't need to deal with the UI, and ended up very happy.
Everyone wondered why I wasn't on github, and queried my sanity at the time. But I say not liking the git cli is perfectly sane. Now jj has come along that excuse has gone, but it was a good one at the time. "github sucks" has conveniently come along as a reason to stay on sourceforge.
Seriously, if you are considering ditching github, take a look at sourceforge. The current owners BizX deserve some reward for the time they've put into it, and their patience.
[0] https://sourceforge.net/p/http-proxy-tunnel/code/ci/default/...
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#954I never had any positive relation to Github. Free software should be developed on free platforms. So I very much welcome this. Fuck Github. Every single outage Microslop vibe codes is a good thing. But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me. I see that it's genuinely sad, but propr…
> I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually. I'm with ya, but building services at the scale of Github, (even when it was a fledgling) requires resources and budgets that very few FOSS projects can even try…
....of course less than 24 hours later I stumble across https://radicle.dev/ completely by accident. It's been in the works for years.
Well played, universe.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#955Earlier 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.
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…
What is your BATNA? If you are going to give them money no matter what they do, they have no reason to listen to your feedback. At all.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#956I 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…
I used to be a hubber - I really hope that institutional change happens at GitHub and I'm glad there are people there still fighting for it. I left because caring deeply (maybe, like the OP, too deeply) for the platform wasn't enough to shift many layers of leadership to focus on performance and reliability. Watching it crumble and lose its early-days focus on engineering excellence was just awful.
Even when we had a CEO telling people to focus on making GitHub Fast (GitHub better and not what people thought would make Microsoft better or make their jobs more secure to MS (because Microsoft bought GitHub because GitHub was the important thing, not so it could be a consumer of Azure) - it was still an uphill fight to change mindset and it didn't go anywhere meaningful.
I really hoped that others would be enable to enact that change after I left, but everything coming out of GitHub makes it look like the core focus is still not on making it fast or reliable or just better overall for people. If a blog post about GitHub's availability still includes the world's third-best major cloud provider as name drop on a solution, people are not focusing on making GitHub better. They are focusing on being part of Microsoft. Make GitHub better first, buy more super fast computers with the fastest everything you can buy, or at least use the best or second best public cloud provider, then work out how to leverage Microsoft to do it in-house or cheaply later. A GitHub that nobody wants to use is a bad investment for Microsoft.
Also, rip out 90% of default feature bloat integrations from initial page loads, add them as discoverable drill-downs or optional things to enable if people need it. Adding every feature under the sun (and copilot) on every place you can think of might read nice, but if you then fail people's most basic needs, you're worse off. GitHub still needs to function as the basic tool for all the future stuff to work. Accept the agentic coding paradigm shift and focus on making the tools faster for the hot paths rather than every path - and yes, that means removing stuff from the hot paths. GitHub today is like a maze, layers of settings and features, like nobody is thinking through UX anymore. This seems unrelated to performance, but this sort of "throw everything at the screen" style of UX is also what leads the backing systems to crumble under load.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#957Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 burnin…
> GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example: - The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself. - The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did n…
Amusing new observation due to today’s outage [0]: apparently GitHub never bothered to do the obvious optimization to the /pulls page: when you load it with the default “is:pr is:open”, they seem to be depending on their heavyweight search service, despite the fact that their normal API can enumerate open PRs just fine (and probably at dramatically lower cost to them). Sometimes the common case of a webpage should be simple instead of a relying on something fancy.
[0] Which has been ongoing for hours but hadn’t started when I wrote my comment. https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/x69zbgdyfzg0
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#958Earlier 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…
> 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
A lot of companies say that when they acquire another, and it might be true for a few years, it might even be the actual intention of the people involved in making the acquisition, but it usually doesn't last.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#959It really has been remarkable watching GitHub just crumble as an organization. There's a lot of discussion about why: the switch from being independent to being part of Microsoft, having resources pushed to Copilot instead of core service, the organization structure itself, a reliance on vibe coding, etc etc. Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status pa…
> I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this
I'm not an insider but would put good money on the migration to Azure being the root cause of the stability problems.
Re: Ghostty is leaving GitHub
#960During one of the x threads where Mitchell was (legitimately) complaining about Github, there were a couple replies suggesting that GitHub should hire him to be their CEO. And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea." There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong ex…
> GitHub should hire him to be their CEO.
Not really the fix you think it might be. That wouldn't change Microsoft's ownership, and he'd still be hamstrung by whatever cost-cutting, anti-competitive, user-unfriendly bullshit Microsoft wants to shove down Github users' throats.