alt Hacker News> "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.
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> There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
I feel like in a very mundane sense, I pay GitHub for a service, and they use that money to pay developers, to then make GitHub better.
It's tough to be working somewhere when usage is booming, and your service is crashing all the time. It's also tough to migrate your infrastructure between platforms, which it sounds like GitHub finally has to do in order to scale to the next level, to really take advantage of being part of Microsoft, although that has to feel pretty frustrating in the short term.
So hang in there GitHub team. Just keep fixing things.
Indeed. Back in 2018 and 2019 I expended a fair amount of time and energy reporting a squash 'n' merge metadata rewriting bug to GitHub and advocating for the behaviour to be changed. [1]
Once or twice someone internal to GitHub got interested... and then drifted away again. Years later the broken behaviour remains. And I'm a lot more cynical about thinking GitHub fundamentals might ever get any better.
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.
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 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".
My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.
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 to do good OSS stuff.
Strongly agree. And not only that, but time has _already_ shown the continued degradation of the github experience even with users ostensibly sticking around trying to "make it better".