I feel like the "GitHub is a mess" conversation is a little forced at times - I spend a significant portion of my work day in GitHub and while there have been an uptick in outages lately, it still feels like a very solid platform.

I guess I personally wouldn't categorize it as a "mess" and the conversations I read about it here make me think I'm using an entirely different product than everyone else.

When you work at an enterprise that depends on Github, frequent outages are actually a pretty big deal and begin to impact productivity in a real way.

It feels to me like this is a case of very rapid increase in load from AI pr's more than product quality degrading because of cruft or poor maintenance. It's annoying but I'm not confident that alternatives will do better in the long run vs GitHub (which I'm guessing will improve with time)

It's not only PRs, my personal projects which used github actions were seeing more builds in a single month than all of the previous year.

Yeah and if I was an enterprise I would definitely be self hosting with Forgejo or Gerrit or whatever. But I think for most hobbyists GitHub is still totally fine.

I use it quite a lot and the first time I actually witnessed downtime myself was yesterday.

github for hobbyists and small orgs and simple open source projects is wonderful.

github for large project that rely on CI tool is a nightmare (cost, downtime, etc.)

I'm guessing you dont know about the github actions bug that was running and endless loop consuming 100% cpu costing orgs insane amounts of money that they didn't fix for 3 years.

I love to hate on Github/Microsoft as much as the next person, but considering the insane amount of code being pushed to it every day, I'd say they're doing quite well.

I disagree. They’ve been struggling with up time for a long time, this seems more related to their move to azure than anything else.

It also shows there’s a fundamental problem with their architecture or their development pattern to have these sorts of issues so frequently.

Plus a rather clear lack of investment into improving it / retaining their talent / etc, yeah: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Anecdotally: at work I saw quite a lot of github-uptime-related issues, and because they're the central host for everything they become *cough* load bearing for a huge amount of the company. Stability and performance has been dramatically worse than the self-hosted phabricator+gitolite before it.

I'd emphasize their practices as being the culprit.

Migrating to different cloud vendors, while difficult, is something that people have done many times before. There's only finite number of incongruences that appear when moving cloud vendors. It's rather difficult to explain the ongoing problems several years after the fact.

Anyone that's worked at a startup knows that one of the best things about it is reflecting on all of the asinine, if not genuinely stupid policies of your previous employer so as not to repeat them. Without any insider knowledge, the practices and procedures GitHub had prior to acquisition probably look nothing like those post-acquisition.

It's falling apart at the seams for me. Half the time I click somewhere on a page, the whole thing freezes and I have to reload the page. Took forever to install neovim on a new machine today because all the plugins installed via Github and I had to wait like 10 minutes for it to come back up.

I’ve heard from people who left GitHub that Microsoft pulled all their best dev ops people to work on AI scaling. This is blatant disinvestment by Microsoft bc they think GitHub is untouchable. I hope better alternatives than musk come up

Really? I feel the opposite.

Earlier today our app, used by a handful of actual production customers, went down for 30 minutes due to a GCP migration to a new project and we screwed up a secret in prod. This was an all hands on deck firedrill with 5 whys and incident reports and chaos.

Github has been having major production outages routinely! There are companies who can't release, can't build, can't view issues, basically can't work. I'd imagine most orgs using Github have been forced to move off of them or create an alternate approach to actually get shit done.

Very solid? Bro. GitHub is at what, one 9 of reliability? That's a disaster. That's a mess and an embarrassment in any professional sense.

I use GitHub a lot and it does what I need well enough, but I wouldn't spend money on the level of service or performance it generally delivers.

Git is objectively better than Subversion. The problem is we are conflating a widely used hosting service with the underlying SCM. We don't need github to use git successfully. Sure, it's nice, but you can install Forgejo or something, which is the exact same boat we were in with Subversion + Trac. You can have that experience right now if you want to.

What github is good for is discovery, getting contributions on open source projects (because it's so popular), and integrations. If you wanted to, you could host your open source project on Forgejo and use github as a mirror just to benefit from the visibility and get contributions.

100% not a chance for me. I'd rather host it myself on a Pi on a 56k dialup connection with 12% uptime then ever let an Elon related company touch my code.

This is the correct answer, but let me add a corolarium, both github, whatever cursor launches and any other bigco does obeys to the same friking iron law: *MAKE MONEY/POWER AT ANY COST, MONEY/POWER IS THE OBJECTIVE*, so you will get EXACTLY the same result from each one of them given enough time has passed.

Or Perforce. Perforce, in my experience, just worked. It also has sane conceptual names for things, a good CLI, SDKs, visual tools, cool features like workspaces that Git completely lacks, etc.

Git also just work. The issue is the host platform, not the CVS

Bastard thing corrupted some of my source code that was "on a shelf". Just gone, no path to retrieving, reimplement it. About a decade ago now and I'm still angry about it. Don't lose the work is table stakes for source control.

My understanding is that Perforce is really strong in the game development industry, right? I think it handles blob/large file assets better or something like that.

Mercurial always looked nice

Mercurial still looks nice.

The last subversion server I had was on prem on VMware. There wasn’t any unscheduled downtime in a decade.

There’s no architectural limitation in Git preventing you from replicating that exact setup for another decade, though.

> I think he’s a net positive to the world.

As a person he's either a poser or a neo-nazi. As a government agent he's responsible for many deaths and as of yet untold harm. Tesla was one of the earliest EV manufacturers, but these days they're overpriced and will be remembered for panel gaps and being destroyed by a car wash. SpaceX has done a lot for that sector, but will mostly be remembered as the company that fucked astrophotography with 10s of thousands of satellites. And Twitter has been dragged into irrelevance so badly it was being called a "reverse startup." Neuralink seems to be going nowhere...

Where's the benefit?

I can forgive him ransacking the federal government, exploiting workers in everything he does, building data centers that pollute like a cartoon villain, backing a fascist takeover of the US and similar ones all over the world, and openly sig-heiling, but I can't forgive him training on my source code!!!

whatever you say bro - https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

why?

Do you not follow the news?

Among many other things he has openly suggested that the EU should be abolished and national sovereignties restored and donated to parties that tow that line.

I don't follow EU politics. Isn't that position a pretty common EU political view? What is evil about decentralization of power?

How is the UK doing after leaving the EU?

ah yes, the EU shall continue to fade into irrelevance (except for as a dope vacation spot and some fine cheese)

Still. 450 million consumers, a GDP of over $23 trillion. Not bad for a cheesy vacation spot.

But the EU isn't obsessed with "winning" or "being number one", like the US, which is number one in almost no area regardless.

If we're switching, we should probably go to fossil instead.

That actually does make sense seeing as fossil bakes in issues and wikis and all that other stuff that makes it hard to use plain git.

GitHub's wikis are just git repositories with folders full of Markdown files. That's the easiest thing to pull out of GitHub. Just git clone the wiki repo. At that point I often just use a git headless merge to merge the second repo into the main repo under a docs/wiki/ folder or similar.

As I recall, in GHE I remember finding that you could even turn off the repo's wiki at that point and then reset it to point to your docs/wiki/ folder and still have the Wiki interface but pointing it to a branch in the same repository. That was a while ago and I don't know if it is still supported in GHE. I also remember it was work managing that wiki branch because Wikis didn't directly support PR workflows if you have branch protection policies. Also from the documentation it doesn't look like it is supported in Public GitHub right now, which seems a shame to me, as someone who likes all documentation in the same repo as the source. I haven't needed Wikis in public GitHub much, so I haven't tried to do anything like point them to a main repo branch.

That's fair. You could also just put the wiki in a different branch if that's your style.

You don’t even need a “gut based” server. Git doesn’t care about the transport

There's other stuff out there. You don't have to use it except when you're working with someone who does and there are other systems with some compatibility for that exact scenario.

Git became popular because Linus Torvalds created it and it's used for the Linux kernel. If it can succeed there then it's battle proven for sure and that's why people pick it. Almost no one is working at that scale though so don't sweat it. Use what you want.

Mercurial was pretty nice back in the day and I think people still use it. If I was going to use something other than git these days, I'd probably take a look at fossil. That thing is so damn cool. You don't even need something like github with that because it's literally built into the fossil binary. And when I say binary, I mean a single, standalone binary for the whole thing.

Okay, well, nothing’s stopping folks from using hg, P4, svn, CVS, RCCS, MS Visual Source Safe, ClearCase, or who knows what else.

Sometimes you get told what to use. And I am free to dislike it :)

That must have been why the used it to manage the linux kernel, because of github

/s

It's painful if you have to work with it and mortals, not kernel devs.

Musk is toxic waste

This feels like an attempt to get more of Musk's non-coder fans to start vibe coding slop-products. "You can now code with Grok via Cursor and host your code on Origin, all without leaving Daddy Elon's ecosystem."