Ghostty is leaving GitHub

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Perceived decline in GitHub reliability

  • Many commenters say GitHub now has frequent, work‑blocking outages (especially Actions, PRs, API, and git operations), sometimes “almost daily.”
  • Others report hardly noticing issues, suggesting uneven impact by region, usage pattern, or time of day.
  • Unofficial status aggregators and colorful incident dashboards are widely cited; some note these may overcount minor incidents, while others say they still understate real problems.

Suspected causes: Microsoft, Azure, AI, scale

  • Strong belief from many that quality dropped soon after Microsoft’s acquisition; some cite pre/post uptime graphs (while noting missing axes and possible bias).
  • Azure migration is heavily discussed: some blame Azure’s reliability, others say the migration is an attempt to cope with growth rather than the root cause.
  • GitHub’s own messaging about agentic/AI coding and “record usage” is viewed skeptically. Some accept that AI‑driven usage growth stresses infrastructure; others argue it’s an excuse for deeper architectural or cultural issues.
  • Several see this as a classic big‑company acquisition arc: initial investment, then cost‑cutting, brain drain, and “spreadsheet management.”

Impact on developers and workflows

  • Teams report PRs not appearing, diffs missing files, merge jobs hanging, webhooks failing, Actions queues stalling, and intermittent 500s making it hard to ship.
  • Maintainers describe motivation hits: if your limited OSS time is spent fighting infra, you just stop working that day.

Alternatives and fragmentation

  • Mentioned options: GitLab, Codeberg/Forgejo/Gitea, Bitbucket, Sourcehut, self‑hosted GitLab/Forgejo, Fossil, Radicle, Tangled, pico.sh tools, onedev.
  • Trade‑offs: GitLab seen as feature‑rich but heavy/slow; Codeberg/Forgejo as lighter but with scaling and uptime questions; Sourcehut minimal but culturally different; decentralized/federated forges promising but immature.
  • Worry that leaving GitHub will fracture discovery and the “central feed” of open source activity.

Emotional reactions and “enshittification”

  • Many resonate with treating GitHub as a “home” for their careers and feeling genuine grief at its perceived decline.
  • Others argue against emotional attachment to any proprietary platform and see this as a predictable outcome of centralization and VC/acquisition dynamics.
  • Broader themes: enshittification, feature factories, AI “slop,” loss of craftsmanship, and nostalgia for earlier, smaller‑web eras.