> "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.
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".
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.
[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368
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 think OP is basically applying "vote with your wallet" strategy and/or some kind of "action speaks louder than words". As I understood from the article, they have been vocal about trying to change things, but they are shouting into the ether since nothing has changed and in fact only getting worse.
Vote with your wallet, or, if you're not paying anything, your feet.
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.
Exactly, only humans should have at least one chance to grow and improve. Orgs are heartless legal entities that deserve no loyalty whatsoever, they are all one acquisition away from turning on you (as a customer or an employee).
Organizations are made up of humans too... but, the bigger they get, the less you notice that. Back in the day when GitHub was still a small company with one (very good) product, I can understand having a feeling of loyalty towards them. Since they are part of M$ and more beholden to M$'s KPIs then to their users, sticking with them only because of nostalgia is probably ill-advised.
I think the example is still valid, orgs will not change if the still get what they want from you
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.
> But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated.
I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".
For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.
Yes, sure! OP didn't say that there aren't alternatives or that the alternatives aren't any good, they just said that GitHub is so huge it will probably continue to remain relevant, no matter how bad it gets. And they have a point - X is one example, but even SourceForge (remember SourceForge?) is still around, despite being an undeniably shitty platform that tried to install adware on their user's computers.
Ah yes. Just like how Blockbuster Video remained relevant and everyone still uses it today.
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.
I may have my timelines wrong but I don't remember github being rock solid 5 years ago. I remember multiple outages keeping us from pulling code for go packages that were not using an enterprise dependency cache and killing multiple days of work a year for those systems. It's what I used as a forcing function to move people TO an enterprise dependency cache, and to find the few scofflaws running work code off of github.com versus enterprise.
You're right. I was misremembering this graph:
https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
That is a pretty wild graph
There is no way Github had 100% uptime prior to the MS acquisition. Nobody has 100% uptime 100% of the time. They must have changed how they were measuring uptime.
Can you explain more of what you mean by "wild" here?
I never worked on any SaaS that had such high uptime. It seems pretty good to me. In 10 years, it was always better than 99.5% uptime. That seems impressive to me for a huge, complex SaaS like GitHub.
I might be wrong, but isn't half a percent almost 2 days of downtime in a year?
Or 7 minutes a day.
Feels like a pretty wildly misleading graph. What do they say about lies, damned lies and statistics?
This graph is literally designed to abuse correlation =/= causation by attaching the arbitrary label "microsoft acquires github" so that the reader will apply causation to the uptime.
Now let's overlay ontop of the uptime graph a few lines of: # of monthly active users, # of monthly commits, size of PRs, action minutes per PR (whatever demonstrates scaling)
Something tells me that the uptime issues follow scale more than they do ownership... but that's not the narrative that this chart was designed for...
The nice thing about statistics and math is that you don't need to stop at a feeling. If doubt their math, do it yourself.
Security: No leaking PII, no compromised build pipelines.
Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).
More AI it is
GitHub lost me when Microsoft used my shitty code to train shitty AI without my permission.
Wym? They had a banner up for months asking if you wanted to opt out.
Comparing to twitter is astute, as there are some analysis that point to it being mostly bots in 2025.
I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity.
Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.
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.
I think the same of AWS. There are alternatives out there, especially for small personal projects.
I use Digital Ocean and couldn't be happier. The bill is small, and it's refreshingly simple to host a container.
I still have battle scars from trying to set up AWS Fargate. It's just a hodge podge of corporately requested features at this point.
I think a better comparison would be between GitHub and 1Password. Both started out as really excellent things for individuals and both became really awful things for individuals in their pursuit of enterprises.
What do you find awful about 1Password today?
People still use 1Password? There are such better alternatives. Why would you subject your self to that awful ux?
So much to list:
- They ditched their previous android app for a new one that doesn't get the grandfathered accessibility access so autofill is mostly useless...
- On mac, safari integration is consistently flaky. It regularly keeps getting blocked in a loop telling me to unlock 1password when 1password has already been unlocked.
- Passkeys are unreliable to the point of being unusable
- Autofill frequently doesn't work well where for some reason the site with the same url as saved in 1password is not offered during autofill. When 1password used to work, it helped catch phishing attempts because it wouldn't show autofill on pages that do not match. Nowadays because of the shitty autofill, people get trained to go to the app, copy the password and paste it in the website. This means that it will no longer protect from phishing attempts
- The previous behaviour of saving any newly generated password as a password object (not login) was much better. Now newly generated passwords are only available in the password history of the browser extension you specifically used.
- I can't tell 1password to ignore a specific website
At this point, the only reason I'm not using bitwarden is that search is very slow on it with 2k+ passwords.
Just to add a dissenting voice to all the complainers:
- autofill on desktop is rock-solid, it virtually never fails, much less so than any other password manager autofill
- it works great with passkeys, again rock-solid, and again the best UX of any password manager. passkeys itself are also great
- OTP code integration (only use this for non-important stuff) works great too, again best-in-class
- switch to Electron was great for most, the Windows app sucked and there was nothing on Linux, now we have a good application across all 3 desktop platforms, although it was a slight downgrade for Mac users
- autofill works fine on Android 99% of the time
- 1Password CLI and SSH agent are interesting additions but SSH has a lot of paper cuts
In general, they have by far the nicest UX and UI of all password managers. And they really seem to care. They were the first to introduce stuff like "no automatic autofill" because of security implications, their vault spec is open source (in case they go belly up), they get audited regularly. They were the first to add passkeys and actually made a site (name escapes me) that shows which services have passkeys and how to activate them.
When I quit using 1Password, it was when they dumped native apps for electron apps and quit supporting the product I’d been buying upgrades for every couple years, in order to pivot to a cloud model that lets them imposing an enterprise subscription model for enterprise users onto individuals. Dunno what they’re up to these days, but I’d be shocked if they could last six months without enterprise customers, so I know I’m not relevant to them anymore. And that’s the same way I view GitHub — individuals are financially and strategically irrelevant to their bottom line.
It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.
I can't globally disable that "autofill" also hits "submit". I want to review what it autofills before I submit. I consider this a security risk. I can disable submit only on a login-by-login basis, and my coworkers are able to reenable it again. I can't globally disable it for myself.
It much buggier for me since the enterprise/electron push.
Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.
FYI I recently discovered a 1p browser extension feature named “Password Generator History”. It has a record of all generated passwords, whether their respective items ever ended up saved or not. Live saver.
https://support.1password.com/recover-unsaved-password/
Same here. I paid for my family's accounts for many years until the app suddenly became much worse. Honestly, Apple's own Passwords app has 95% of the features of, and the ones it does have work far better than the 1P equivalent. I can't imagine paying for a personal account again.
Not the parent, but the only thing I really hate about 1Password is that I can't tell it to never offer to save a specific site's password. I can turn off all offers to save passwords, or I can have the stupid pop-up ask me multiple times a day if I want to save that password. The pop-up chases me across the site until I get rid of it. Aarrgh. Blood boiling. Rage overflowing.
Other than that it's fine, I guess.
I have the same issue when using Google Passwords. One specific example: Many of my bank websites require 2FA with a code via email, SMS, or token. Each time, Google Chrome asks me if I want to update the password with the 2FA token. I have no idea how to disable it. Am I doing something wrong?
I have the same complaint about lastpass. With lastpass it's doable, but I have to keep looking up how to configure a site to never site and never ask.
It’s getting buggier and buggier, not being able to fill in passwords properly is kind of a glaring omission of a password manager (and that’s on three different computers). They keep adding features but seem to show little interest in fixing bugs. I submitted debug logs, recorded videos etc but it just trickled out in the sand. And as another poster wrote, it all started going bad with the switch to Electron (might be the rust backend that is the problem, I don’t know and frankly don’t care, it just doesn’t work as well as it did before).
> 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 into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.
GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.
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.
Most places I've worked I've had the autonomy to re-install my machine to whatever OS I worked with, so was always Debian Linux.
Then I joined some mega-corp, with it's structures and set systems, so opted for a Macbook.
Worst mistake of my life, OSX is horrid, I'd rather use Windows.
Maybe you can install homebrew and open source apps to make it more Linux like, but you'll still be stuck with Mac OS's shonky window and task management UI unfortunately.
It is actuly good for the ecosystem to have competition. Githubs quasi monopoly was a bad thing. And will continue to be a bad thing in the future if it remains
The problem is that from the outside it seems like Microsoft no longer cares about the product. So much so that "the product" has become "shareholders"[0].
We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.
We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.
In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...
I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZFTaEenaHM
> 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.
The problem is just, you don't pay GitHub for their service, you pay Microsoft for a service called GitHub, and Microsoft will put your money in their "earnings" basket and do whatever they want with it. Not sure if the amount of money Microsoft gets from GitHub subscriptions directly affects how much "love" the GitHub service gets.
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.
This doesn't apply to current Github issues, where rather than a lack of the "right" new features, it's just an escalating degradation of existing services that is the complaint.
The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.
The only users who can push for features now are those who can somehow directly influence people working on GitHub (a small number of users) or those with massive purchasing accounts that can shake Microsoft itself to its core (governments, fortune 100 companies).
I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
> 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
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
To add on, GitHub has made it explicitly clear that they are both not working on features to focus on their Azure adoption and many core projects are in stasis even from community contributions.
https://github.com/actions/checkout#note
No. Products don't magically get good because people conjured up features from thin air or just copied a competitor. It is very much a two-way street, especially when the product acts as a platform that tries to support heterogeneous use cases.
It is not the users job. Literally. If you want that kind of feedback from users, then identify your power users and offer them contracts and money.