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.
Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).
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.
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 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.
Other than that it's fine, I guess.
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.
Took a year till everyone was using a Mac.
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.
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.
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 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.
I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.