Ghostty is leaving GitHub

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A prominent open source project’s decision to leave GitHub over frequent outages and degraded reliability has become a flashpoint for wider concerns about the platform’s trajectory under Microsoft. Commenters link the instability to Azure migration, AI‑driven usage growth, and shifting corporate priorities, and note that core workflows like pull requests, CI and issues are now regularly disrupted for many teams. The thread also explores what might replace GitHub’s de facto central role—from GitLab and Codeberg to self‑hosted and federated forges—while warning that any successor will face the same scaling and governance challenges.

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.