I 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 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.

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 job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.

I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.

In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.

I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.

I can feel the frustation, nothing dramatic about expressing it

This quote from the post resonated with me:

> 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.

The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?

Anyone who makes fun of you for feeling things probably isn't anyone you want to listen to, anyway.

Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.

Spool of Wire Guy or Wiregate refers to a viral video of a man (named Dan) telling his wife (Cindy) that a spool of wire he's had for 40 years is almost at its end

The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spool-of-wire-guy

> tears hit my keyboard

That is indeed a dangerous slip. I hope yours wasn't an Apple machine. Warranty might be an issue, because even if just one key got soiled, they will propose you should replace "practically" the entire machine (or rather make you; because well, replacing just that exact part that was damaged would be less expensive and hence less efficient and environmentally unfriendly).

On the other hand, not at all ridiculous; dramatic yes. I almost felt sad when Orkut shut down. Almost. And around the time XMPP/Jabber stopped being like email when Google/Fb pulled the plug. Can't remember whether it was at the same time. I became numb to such fast and slow metamorphoses a long time ago and I feel sad about this numbness. It's a forced cynicism I'd say. These are such inane corporate events/changes and yet these are so deeply embedded in our lives. Without check and any power over them. So perpetual cynicism works.

PS. I really found Ghostty to be cool (and fast!). Sadly, I reverted to stock Terminal, not because Terminal is as good, but because I no longer have/had much terminal usage (until I get back to work/coding again, and I hear things are happening in the terminal a lot more again with our world's new coding toys, LLMs, and whatnot). I also heard you on a podcast recently, and it was very interesting, and since then, I want to try Ghostty again, without even a real need for it yet.

> I 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).

No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.

> 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.

I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal.

For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.

Nothing stupid about caring deeply about tools that shaped your career. GitHub wasn't just a SaaS for a lot of us it was where we learned to build. The fact that you're emotional about it says more about how much you gave to that platform than anything else.

Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!

I don’t know if you remember but we met at cfgmgmtcamp in 2016.

https://imgur.com/a/auPVRuq

We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.

You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.

You sure did keep it up.

Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.

Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”

… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.

Still, keep it up.

There isn't inherently wrong with loving a tool or been sad when it it becomes something you can't love anymore, we are tool using monkeys after all - it is perhaps our defining characteristic.

I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).

> I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.

I jumped ship as soon as they added MFA. I vibe-coded my own raw Git repository reader to help consolidate my other repos (BitBucket, GitLab), which inevitably started to impose more restrictions (disk space, MFA), as well. It's no GitHub, but works, doesn't cache, and is pure PHP.

https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek

> Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things.

We don't cry over things, we cry over what things mean.

I don't see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.

Completely understand the work/life/hobby fusion.

And I think that you and GitHub went through the stages of life together. They probably weren't exactly parallel, but I bet you measure and remember your life through GitHub's life to some degree, along with the projects you had there.

There's no question that with your drive and acumen that you could build the GitHub that you both had and want. It might be your next chapter.

> Nobody should cry over a SaaS

This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.

I wasn’t that invested in StackOverflow but still I was quite invested there.

I do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it.

I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong.

Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place.

GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.

We all understand that. We had some piece of software we still cling on to it (in my case is a copy of paint shop pro 5, corel draw 7 and Delphi 7), despite being completely obsoleted or assassinated by "big industry". I could add CoolEdit 2000 to it, but havent really opened it in a decade.

To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.

I feel you mate. When people were scrolling Facebook, I was scrolling github, being so excited to see so many people building things together. Commits popping up in my stream were making me feel we were improving the world, bit by bit. It was an happy stream, compared to the depressing stream of Facebook. And then Microsoft bought github. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before it would fell down. It also made little sense to build all our beloved open source projects in the living room of the entity who was so harmful to our community for years. So I left github and joined several gitlabs. But I never found back this central steam of "look at open source being made in real time". We need a decentralized gitlab with ActivityPub.

I don't think it is dramatic. I felt a similar sadness around this subject. It's the meaning behind it: the hacker spirit, the naive curiosity, the juveline freedom, being destroyed by the corporate machine. It is a small metaphor that hits all of us in different spots.

And boy, does it hurt.

I felt pangs of emotion reading the post so it’s definitely not just you.

I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.

And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.

It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.

Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.

Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.

I'm sure others have probably said this, but I'll say it anyways. Give Gitea a try. This is what I do. I self-host all my projects and mirror them to Github if they are public projects. And I have distributed Gitea runners across my various servers and they just work and my pipelines never fail me. I'd also highly recommend GitLab CE for similar reasons. But, if you really don't want to self-host, GitLab proper is also awesome and way better than GitHub IMO.

I find the decline of these things upsetting too. I don't know if it slots into enshittification specifically, but there's a phenomenon of decline in general that's so antithetical to where my career began and what I thought was possible. I want to believe we can do better, and ideals can still matter in software.

And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.

I think people today think that compartmentalization is easy but sometimes in life your work and personal life and everything else gets all mixed up and you get situations where others might call it unhealthy but for you, it’s fine ante it’s how you want to live your life.

That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.

we can be ai-powered, we can be engineers.

but most of all we’re humans :)

happy to see that some humans can still feel emotions, real emotions, and not be ashamed by them.

Wow, thanks for your honesty here. I'm commenting primarily to commend your decision-making which I couch in empathetic understanding. I saw your post and immediately thought, "good, surprised it took {any organization leaving github} this long." I don't hate big M nor the 'github ecosystem' (except maybe github actions, which seems to get 10x the attention it deserves); the challenge is I perceive far better solutions to be chosen which would serve the open source world if we simply deploy a slight increase in cognitive energy.

Whoever makes fun of you over it is exactly the people you want to avoid.

Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.

For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.

Not everyone can do it. Respect.

It's a fair writeup and your thoughts are valid. Businesses have to continue to re-earn customer trust each year - especially when it's mission critical and they expect recurring revenue. I hope they find their way too.

If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.

It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every time people talk about their decisions and normalize anything that's not just having a monoculture where there are no competitive markets and monopolists control entire ecosystems, that's a good thing.

> I have an unhealthy relationship with it.

You really, really do. Please, for your own benefit, take a step back and touch grass, literally. There is so much more to this world than Github of all things.

> Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years... During my honeymoon while my wife is still asleep? Yeah, GitHub

This is addiction

"Lately, I've been very publicly critical of GitHub. I've been mean about it. I've been angry about it. I've hurt people's feelings. I've been lashing out. Because GitHub is failing me, every single day, and it is personal. It is irrationally personal. I love GitHub more than a person should love a thing, and I'm mad at it. I'm sorry about the hurt feelings to the people working on it."

Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing

Dramatic or not, it needed to be said and I appreciate you saying it. Nobody would listen if I said it. ;-)

Bruh you're exceedingly wealthy, you'll get through this.

No man, I'm with you. I remember when GitHub was a joy to use. Finding new niche tools and projects written by people who actually cared about their work. Needed some simple postgres backup script? Browser GitHub and plenty of people put time and effort in creating something that actually worked.

I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.

Do you think this is endemic to large software organizations today, or are our needs (and the corresponding complexity) just outstripping the ability of old business models to address it?

People who reach outlier-level success in a field tend to have strong opinions and an emotional connection to said field. It’s probably a non-trivial part of why they are so successful.

You feel how you feel and that's totally fine.

What OSS friendly platform will you be moving to?

God would cry too if they saw the world they created. Let the salty tears flow

Forgive me if you’re not in a solutioning phase right now … but how motivated are you to fix this?

I’m a big fan of ghostty and also unenamoured with the current state of GitHub and Microsoft.

That is to say I believe this is an opportunity to disrupt the incumbent player and I’m game. HMU if you feel similar and want to discuss.

GitHub died when MS bought it. It was great back in the day, it shaped a lot of modern day FOSS culture but now it's just MS.

In a reductive sense, yeah it's a bit silly. But zooming out, I can understand. Sucks to have your hand forced. Sucks to be let down. Sucks to watch something that was great fall from grace.

Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!

Bud. Right decision. Time is a forward moving arrow. You gotta do what's right for the project and over the years I've rarely seen your decisions going against the stream.

Is this you moving a git repo to another git hosting service?

I feel this way, although less emotional, with Unity.

Unity taught me how to program and , along with JavaScript turned me from a college dropout to a software engineer.

Finished my degree later.

I still love Unity, but the company is stable. If I friend needs help with a Unity project, I'm down, but I start all my new games with Godot.

I'm not sad though. Unity is like a friend I'm still cool with, we just drifted apart.

But from a realistic point of view. Did we really think Unity and GitHub were charities in pursuit of the greater good.

Of course not. They cashed out, made money and whatever good they did along the way was a nice side effect.

I don't know why but I don't want to make fun of you. Just sad you can't enjoy it anymore.

This post reminds me of Linus video on Git, calling Subversion the most stupid project because it was.... Centralized. ;-)

"Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

"I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."

hug

Thank you for your hard work.

If you choose something self-hostable (whether hosted commercially for you or no is of no relevance), I'm very interested to hear about it.

Hey bud, thanks for the honesty and I feel your pain! You're an incredible engineer and I've looked up to you (even though we are the same age) since hanging out at Kiip. Our tools should be getting better not worse. Hopefully your influence can be a canary in the coal mine to make some real change to reliability. -D

> 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.

Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)

You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.

my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.

I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.

Damn GitHub is at a new low. I wish GitHub wasn't overtaken by the AI agents and hoped that the situation would improve. But it just didn't and ever since Microsoft took it over, it was just run into the ground.

I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.

The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

Github won't shed a single tear in return, hell, they probably didn't even know until this came out. And not to sound harsh, but they probably don't care either. If they don't 'find their way', then there are 10 different competitors ready to take over, and I hope some of them do. Better for the ecosystem to have a strong element of competition. Perhaps their time as top dog is ending, and it's only natural, nothing lasts forever, especially in tech.

Throwing out this idea, but would you ever consider making your own version of Github?

the acquisition by microslop was the death knell for gh.

> I 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).

> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing.

Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.

It's not a stupid thing - GitHub not being serious about basic reliability is, at this point, a big risk to people depending on it for change management, much less OSS projects needing it to do every aspect of work in the public.

GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.

> GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better

Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.

No serious person would make fun of this emotional reaction. It seems technology had something going on, and it quickly got flooded by incompetence and greed.

We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology. I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here.

Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.

"They're your feelings and no one else has the right to how you should feel about them."

You have been a tremendous influence on my professional life. Vagrant made VMs easy to use. You were very gentle with my Vagrant PRs. We disagreed a bit and I migrated some of those rejected Vagrant PRs into VeeWee. Then Hashicorp happened and I was over the moon. (Full transparency - not everything was perfect, I lost 50% of my Hashicorp equity which hurt real bad but that's not your fault, just saying there were ups and downs!)

This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:

You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.

More importantly, Mitchell, you care.

Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.

[dead]

[dead]

Tools can be frustrating. We can get emotional with tools we appreciate and we grew up with. But we should also learn to not focus solely on work efficiency. As you say yourself, this is unhealthy. You've labeled it, now work on fixing that unhealthy relationship with work, and with that tool.

Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day.

We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties.

Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc

> I actually cried writing this blog post (tears hit my keyboard, I'm embarrassed to say).

If this is the truth, this is not normal. I'm not saying that in a judgmental way but from a place of good intention. You might want to check out your testosterone levels.