alt Hacker NewsGhostty is leaving GitHub
Comments
If Atlassian had vision they'd swoop in with a sponsorship offer for Ghostty that included moving it to BitBucket.
It's odd. I've been having the same feeling as well. Earlier this week, they sent that email about copilot, which I don't use but pay $10 a month for and I canceled my subscription.
i would be very interesting seeing how the dev space will look in 5 years from now, and how would github look in 5 years from now
>i have stopped opening github, i just use github cli heavily, that's it, gh gives everything i need out of the box
on github actions run on github and agent pull them, checks the issues and fixes the code, the whole workflow changed
Whoever made the decision to sell Github to Microsoft killed it, we’re just attending the funeral now.
GitHub has become a place where you seek people’s attention. There are other places you can freely host your projects. GitLab was always available. I just haven’t logged in for I don’t know how long. An open source project is essentially a show window to the internet by a lonely developer. Ghostty has already established a great community. It’s already on display on a skyscraper. The project is mature enough that it needs a dedicated discussion forum or something like that. I am excited to see where it will find home and how it will evolve.
This comment doesn't add anything novel to the discussion, but is worth adding I think because hubbers and MSFT folks read HN - I too am evaluating leaving personally. Professionally, we're talking about it loosely, and if it continues it will become an increasing likelihood.
There's clearly opportunity for a GitHub replacement that can operate reliably at scale.
I support Forgejo and Codeberg, but it's not clear that its architecture can scale to GitHub levels.
Microsoft subsidises a lot of OSS development. Who has equally big pockets?
An obvious pivot would be to Codeberg. Is there some missing feature there rendering such a move less desirable than I imagine?
Is "migration to azure" or "microsoft acquisition" a cause or a symptom?
I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.
Imagine if MS just did a git revert all the way back to ~2020. That was peak GitHub for me. We got some niceties the first couple of years after the acquisition - free private repos, Sponsors, secret scanning, a new mobile app and CLI - but things were still pretty stable, before their architecture and the little UX touches got destroyed.
What a timeline that would be. One can dream.
Possibly in a few years from now we'll get actual data about how many outages we've seen or how much have x services degraded, overlapped with the push for "AI everywhere".
Read the piece waiting for a diatribe on MS's unethical practices, left with an uptime complaint. Ok, if that is what it takes for people to move away from them, we'll take it.
What I want to see is Linux kernel leaving GitHub...Always had a bad feeling about it being hosted at somewhere controlled by Microsoft..
's been dead since microsoft acquired them in 2018
OP takes issue with GitHub's constant outages and alludes to agents (and Copilot bloat) as the primary cause.
Lots of big services are like this. Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak. I'm up right now because I know my Runpod VM in Kentucky is going to die rather abruptly and I'll need to manually get it up.
Everything has its flaws.
Microsoft lets you host your code, websites and media for free and
Just checked and I'm Github user 2,040,833
https://api.github.com/users/<username>
We are finally getting closer to me getting to delete my last account with Microsoft. Nixpkgs: please follow suit.
Man on his period cries. He also needs more hobbies.
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."
> I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there.
This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.
the issue is where to go?
codeberg, self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, still-beta sourcehut, tangled? github was “the git community” and now it’s fracturing—you need accounts everywhere, you can’t easily discover neat projects
i like tangled if only because it’s built on atproto which emphasizes ownership and transferability of identity: something that would make the move off github so much easier
"The timing of this is coincidental with the large outage on April 27, 2026."
This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.
Are that many companies really using github? None of the handful of companies I've worked for have used a public repo.
i empathize with the folks running a largely free service who are being spammed by bots and built everything around some other assumptions
about to launch my first open source project in days. reading this with a knot. github used to be a default; now it's a decision. and watching mitchellh agonize publicly is the honest preview every new maintainer gets from now on.
Best alternative list anyone?
The question is where do you go?
GitHub has a north star now, it's called "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
gh been going down hill since microslop took over. No surprise.
Maybe you could start a new github - create the job you always wanted!
Copilot showing up unbidden on my PRs was the final straw for me. Well, actually, the final straw was not being able to figure out how to turn it off.
We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.
I reiterate gitlab > github
pack it up. we're going to codeberg.
>This is not the large Elasticsearch outage they had on April 27, 2026. This blog post was written a week before that, so this was a different outage.
Great footnote to finish the article.
I, honestly, do not care about Github. As just a career dev it gives no utility except that a lot of the open source projects are on there.
If I was OpenAI / Anthropic, I would see this as a massive opportunity.
I mean, why wouldn't you want to consolidate git repos, a heroku/fly.io/vercel like container system and direct access to web-based coding tools. They have the coding models and agents, slap a web interface over Claude Code running in a container, allow for commits and deploys. Control the entire stack.
> Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub.
Well, he is not alone with that. Something isn't working - and Microsoft either does not realise it, or does not care. I think the microslop strategy consumed Microsoft internally; it seems unable to change trajectory now. It's like you are driving to a cliff, in a car but you are not the main driver. It's quite interesting to see though - people can now expect "which disaster will hit Github tomorrow".
On the other hand, I also think it is time that Github gets some serious competition. Gitlab is not that competition; codeberg also not really (they'd need to up the useful features by a LOT and keep on driving that - I just don't see they have enough energy and momentum for that, but as a smaller source code hosting platform they are not bad either).
Looks like removing the "meritocracy" doormat, hiring Coraline Ada Ehmke, and changing "master" to "main" paid off in spades!
Sadly I feel the same way towards Windows.
> To the "Git is distributed!" crowd: the issue isn't Git, it's the infrastructure we rely on around it: issues, PRs, Actions, etc.
Yet again, I wish the prevailing SCMS were more like Fossil, where issues and forum posts, at least, are part of the repository (and everything lives in a single sqlite file). (Of course Fossil actively opposes "pull requests", separate issue)
Hear me out: Github needs ads . If option A is downtime (and data integrity issues), Ads are more favorable. The terminal UI and PRs are both captive real estate that developers have to pay attention to.
There is a simple cost equation of 40-100x demand vs a fixed op-ex budget for the org. Github can either 40x their paying customer fees or try to monetize all of the free vibecoder (and open source) traffic.
I thought that Ghostty was a company that had partnered with GitHub. But no it’s a popular open source application.
So they will move their CI and issue tracker somewhere else.
And this will be largely a springboard for “people are leaving the ship huh” and misc. GitHub demise discussions.
It really has been infuriating lately. Between this and my company's proxy screwing with HTTP/2 at least once a day the frustration is very very real. While I'm nowhere as invested in GitHub its decline does make me sad.
The unspoken reality of github: It would be significantly better both as a product and a vehicle in our economy if it was entirely worker owned.
I could recommend trying out source hut!
GitHub literally getting ghosted