Ghostty is leaving GitHub

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 discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.

I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.

I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.

1. https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.

I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.

I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.

So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.

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 execution and power to attract talent.

I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.

Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.

this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.

Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.

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 issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)

1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.

2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.

Perhaps it's a bit of both.

It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.

Github is really Microsoft. The above paragraph captures perfectly what it's like to work in a big company like Microsoft.

When Github was a startup, it was both a tech company and a social media for coders and a real-life social scene (especially in SF, some pretty epic stories over the years).

Once Github was acquired, it was a countdown to all the soul being sucked out of it and simply a mechanism being left behind.

So where are we going? Mitchell will be deciding for Ghostty. If github's current trajectory is anything to go by, everyone else will need to decide where to go sooner rather than later.

I'm worried that it will be a Babel scattering event and this open source superpower that github catalyzed (how to describe it?) will just evaporate.

I'm also worried that wherever we go next could have the same fate as github.

So what then? Radicle is the only thing that I've seen that could theoretically 'solve' the problem, though it still needs a lot of work: https://radicle.dev/

Now, you must have a whatng cartel web engine to interact with most of the basic features.

Thx microsoft, again.

devs should start to leave microsoft github, but for a forge which respects the web (namely which has a web site, and which is not only a web app).

From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/

It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!

There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.

Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...

https://x.com/sagitz_/status/2049153195243372569

With malicious HTTP headers, any user could access any repo on Github.com, or on the Enterprise Github instance they might have access to. It's even worse than that because it's remote code execution on the Github server.

It seems like Github has been a mess since the Microsoft acquisition. Definitely feels like another multi billion dollar screwup in the making, like Skype or Nokia were.

Hopefully the incidents in the last few weeks are a wakeup call, and they start getting their shit together.

Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.

Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))

Having said that, I stumbled upon this curious blog post about a security issues in Forgejo: https://dustri.org/b/carrot-disclosure-forgejo.html

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.

I don’t know, I love it. There are many alternatives like bitbucket, gitlab, but GitHub is still better overall.

1. faster more configureable action runtimes so I can get faster builds 2. usable merge queues because the github one is a joke 3. some reasonable CI management and workflow debugging features

I've never had such an obsession to a platform or an activity as this. Some might say this is unhealthy, but I admire folks who can reach this level of obsession in their craft. It's just a joy to read about for me

The alternatives aren't great. If any VCs wanna send a couple hundred grand my way, I'd be willing to start a GitHub alternative, if only so I could have a not-crappy place to host my own repos.

> This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day

Do people seriously experience outage every day? I really don't know... it always has been feeling like a once-per-six-month thing. Do people have extremely complex Actions that I can't fathom?

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.

I have nothing to add to this. Comedy gold.

The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.

I looked up my own ID and GitHub join date from the API, all the way back in 2009: https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2036866220449030168

There's probably a few more to be added there now.

The vast majority of features GH offers are of no use to me. In fact, in the age of vibe coding, zero-friction drive-by contributions are a net negative. The UX has been steadily dropping for years. The recent abysmal record in availability and bugs is just the last drop in the bucket.

The writing was on the wall the day they were acquired. They had a good run, but those days are long over.

Too negligible a problem. Service outages are much more important issues, and much less controversial.

Is it really this bad?

I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.

And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)

https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...

They've started shipping stuff again, but it's mostly not stuff I want.

I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.

Large platforms like GitHub have strong security teams and fast patching, but they also concentrate risk. A single vulnerability or abuse pattern can affect a huge portion of the ecosystem.

Decentralizing critical infrastructure doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it.

What It Means for Open Source, Infrastructure and Security: https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183

Ideally with private repos for free or a modest fee.

Gitea doesn't count because they only want to sell hosting to large organizations. The pre MS github model for private repos was just fine(tm).

what a cliff hanger!

As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.

The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.

I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!

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 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 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?

The other week I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my actions jobs were just stuck on waiting and not starting.

For my personal stuff, I think I'm going to migrate to either my own selfhosted instance of something like gitea or codeberg, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore imo for GitHub, even with stuff like free runners and pages.

I personally think this is mainly attributed to GH Copilot and I would love to know if MS/GH even makes a profit on it.

https://archive.md/KZ0sy

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac...

So in response to GitHub Issues, PRs, etc. being occasionally inaccessible each day, you're going to make them inaccessible for months?

Feels like a knee-jerk emotional decision, one that doesn't serve you, Ghostty, or the community.

At least have your backup ready to go

best dev platform

Am I an agent? Are you?

Is Claude... God?

(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)

Are other people being impacted every day by github outages?

What does that look like?

I'm not saying the writer is wrong, I'm just wondering how folks who experience this every day work / how that exposure plays out / what it is.

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

https://api.github.com/users/<username>

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Either way, the thing that irks me about the Github situation is that so many people joined Github specifically because it was "where everything was happening". And now they realize that having one place where everything is happening is not really a great situation if that place starts going south. We need a range of providers with good interop rather than centralization.

>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

What a timeline that would be. One can dream.

The author is entitled to his feelings. People can host their projects wherever they like. However, this is also a huge drama about basically nothing. GitHub is actually much more useful now than it was in its heyday (when it had far fewer features to go wrong).

This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.

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

This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.

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."

We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.

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).

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.

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)

fwiw - i do keep a fair amount of code in my computer. i don't push everything..

I'm GitHub user 191,754 (2010). Wow...

Great footnote to finish the article.

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.

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.

An Update on GitHub Availability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932422

Over said decades I've worked on countless (open source) projects there.

Professionally? 1 project in all those years. Yes, exactly 1 (still there).

Every single other project was either in bitbucket, gitlab, gitea, forgejo or... I am sure I forgot some forge.

What I am trying to convey is: fascinating how "everything is on GitHub" is a very american way to see the world.

Yes, it seemed like Microsoft had a brief interregnum period of about 10 years where they seemed to have a renaissance and a genuine culture change and a concern for quality and initiative seemed to take hold.

And for many of us who came into the industry in the 90s this was a strange period because actually post-Gates/Balmer MS suddenly seem not so bad?

But that was until the first deals with OpenAI and the first round of layoffs. After Musk's purges at Twitter, MS was the first to really join in the fray.

Since then the old MS is back. Clearly as Machiavellian as in the past. But kind of sadder and more pathetic.

But honestly I'm also a bit confused by the framing some people have this thread because I remember GitHub always having reliability issues in its early days. It and Twitter were both famous RoR projects with notorious and constant outage issues in the 2008/2009 time-frame.

- Mr. Anderson