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#github#more#https#gitlab#don#self#hosted#own#why#years
Discussion (216 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The wildest thing is that Azure Repos/Pipelines was better than this.
Their one caveat is also that they are still migrating it to Azure infra, so it's possible that's still in a one foot in one foot out kinda scenario, from what I've heard. But, this isn't inspiring confidence.
They mentioned they have some elasticsearch reindexing going to, I would guess they needed to regard or move stuff and something didn't work well. But if I understood it right they mentioned the PRs ES index which they didn't shared proof increased as the number of repos.
It might be anything. It seems they lost huge chunks due to layoffs and structural changes and MS which has the reverse golden Midas touch.
This is just pure speculation but also now there is no reason for MS to keep GH working. They absorbed all code they wanted. Now they can let it burn. Would be even better for them if that happened
But the 1% of repos that do have PRs and actions are likely going to be seeing enormous increases in volumes
I have been a part of two very large companies with self hosted gits and I've seen enough to be confident that this is an incredibly hard thing to manage
Anyone who has been part of that journey knows how painful it really is. A lot of times the systems to fail at all levels, and you have to redesign it from the first principles.
[1] https://bloomberry.com/data/github/
I simply do not care.
Customers pay for a service. If they don't get what they paid for, it's perfectly reasonable and normal to go elsewhere.
Why do people on HN keep apologizing on the behalf of trillion-dollar companies?
Self hosted is probably the way to go, but hardware prices are insane currently.
As you say it's limited, but that can be both good and bad.
"Someone" can cancel the migration. "Someone" just won't.
now i'm considering deploying jenkins.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242 https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Same experience here. Add to that that even on Enterprise tier:
- 1 Enterprise : 1 namespace - although you can segment it with Orgs, we were advised not to do it because we're too small (~2k people) (GL: groups, subgroups, sub-subgroups, ...)
- SSH deploy keys are singletons across the entire instance and repo-bound (and Weblate for instance can only use its own key), so you need a service account for that (GL: instance-wide SSH deploy keys that you can activate in specific repos)
- GHCR only really supports classic PATs for authentication ( https://docs.github.com/en/packages/working-with-a-github-pa... - GL: proper deploy keys properly inherited throughout the hierarchy)
So all in all the experience so far is a huge step-down. I really liked pinning commonly accessed pages in the sidebar.
What made it better than e.g GitLab?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js_Y_q-IkYo
MSFT should just create slophub.com they'd make money im sure.
As a private person I use it too as a free hoster, but from work I mainly know self hosted instances of jenkins and TeamCity.
When one firm is so dominant for so long, the question is more like “Why shouldn’t we just use GitHub like 80% of software companies do?”
The issues they’ve had are almost all very recent. Very few companies have reevaluated that decision, because moving a big and well-integrated part of infrastructure is a huge project that delivers no value to the business. Speculating that you’ll have fewer development-slowing outages is not the most convincing when asking for the budget to do this. Plus, self-hosted isn’t necessarily going to have better uptime - mistakes happen.
I think before Actions, it would have been a lot easier to migrate off GH though. You’d just need to change a lot of repo URLs and find a way to set up webhooks from the new place to poke CI. Now with Actions, a lot lives in GH and in a proprietary flavor that doesn’t just ‘lift and shift.’
Mostly boils down to marketing and easier to establish a community. Almost every developer has an account there, leading to network effects being much larger, so if you're a new FOSS project, finding contributors and getting your project in front of other's eyes is much easier when you're on GitHub compared to your own Forgejo instance.
With that said, I'd question if chasing "most external one-time contributors" or GitHub stars is the right way to actually run a FOSS project, personally I'd avoid thinking about those vanity-numbers as much as possible and focus on the project, code and contributors themselves.
But, I've literally heard those two arguments for "why GitHub" countless of times over the years.
I guess it’s all the other non-git stuff like issue tracking and other (unfortunately) centralized products on GitHub that causes disruption when they go down.
Weird how GitHub built itself around a distributed VC system and then made all its other services centralized.
Since then though, holy cow have things gotten worse. The UX has changed more times than I can count and seems to get worse every time. Rough edges never get fixed, but new ones get introduced all the time. It's hard to think of anything useful that has been added or improved in recent years.
It's such a shame. GitHub is its own mess and I really wish GitLab had made itself a clear superior alternative and eaten their lunch.
The next update warned us about the problem, so we ran the repair commands to put things in order again. This is a very small server with ~10 users and ~50 repos at most.
I was completely turned off my GitLab when I was updating my SSH keys across multiple accounts: GitHub, Bitbucket, Codeberg, etc.
GitLab was really buggy; it is impossible to update the SSH key in GitLab using Firefox, and no obviously indications it was a GitLab Firefox compatibility bug. Took me nearly an hour to think to try and use Chrome to upload the new SSH key.
Ugh. I won’t touch GitLab again after that experience.
I don't expect everybody and their nan to leave GitHub by next wednesday and spin up their own Forgejo server, but I do think GitHub should be worried that people are finally looking to move away from them.
For the people who want to do their work and get on with their life, it does not really matter that much.
Gosh. We're going from software to slopware.
https://gitprotect.io/blog/devops-threats-unwrapped-mid-year...
That's from 2025 but it continued getting even worse this year.
https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/who-left-gh/
Currently I know 3 projects, Ghostty, Bookstack-app, Hardenedbsd who have seemed to move away from Github from my understanding.
https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/
How do you find out what "github user #" you are?
Or look at the html source of your avatar, https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/2851?v=4
If I were to bet, there's probably a product manager or other leader who's just gung-ho on new features and loosing track of who their customers are and what their needs are.
They don't/didn't care because what are you going to do?
On one hand, the free users shouldn't complain too much, though I get their anger. But the place I work is an enterprise paying customer and this is bullshit.
But the vibe coding BS probably made it 10 times worse.
The acquisition was 8 years ago.
Yup, keep seeing this in various companies. Teams that were effective and did solid engineering now are more effective and does even better engineering. Teams that were effectively already just "boilerplate monkies" now produce a lot more code than before, but the quality is the same so effectively they're worse at contributing now than before, and take more shortcuts, not less.
From my point of view, agents are amplifiers, so if you usually build spaghetti projects, agents just help you do that faster, not avoid the spaghetti altogether. If you usually build well-designed stuff, they can help you put that together faster.
Add in them being extremely high scale and critical infrastructure and it's easy to see where things can go wrong, vibe added code or not. I think we'd all prefer they have long slow roadmaps but clearly leadership thinks they're in a fight with the other AI companies to release the newest and bestest every day.
Embrace, extend, and extinguish.
What exactly are they extinguishing GitHub to the benefit of? Azure Repos?
The original red dog team that started azure is long gone and the general success of the cloud papers over all levels of incompetence so that the incompetence is now entrenched and unable to do better.
Cloud service providers have this unfortunate property where poor designs will make more money which makes it hard to maintain a culture of excellence. I tried to push a design change that would result in a 10x throughput for a certain product and was told that a 90% drop in usage is the last thing they want. I self host my own stuff with GitLab, so far not a single unplanned outage in 6 years.
Perhaps a Roman decimation is in order, whenever GitHub experiences an outage fire one GitHub employee at random. That should help get interests in line and allow for cross org cooperation. With 150 outages per year and a staff of 6,000 that amounts to 2.5% per year if no improvements are made.
I, too, am a fairly, but not immediate early user of GitHub. Despite GitHub’s poor metrics, I am still shipping, because writing software doesn’t require GitHub.
Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace, but if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.
The post being replied to essentially said “I don't use the features that have been regularly broken in recent times, or where the features I do use [core git] were broken it luckily didn't affect me, so anyone thinking of leaving has a mental problem”.
Or to paraphrase the old joke:
Q: How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: The sunlight through the windows here is working fine, if you can't see where you are that must be a “you” problem.
If your workflow doesn't need the features that have had reliability problems over recent times (which includes some of the basic collaborative features), is GitHub even the right tool for your task? If not, then your judgement of others for complaining about the issues is presumptuous to the point of being somewhat obnoxious.
You don't often see the completely unhinged ad hominem 'faux mental health concern' segway here on Hacker News to try and paint someone as 'disturbed'. Thought that was mainly a Reddit thing people do.
GitHub’s downtime is a problem for issue tracking, PR merging, contributing and reviewing PRs, and more.
Your exact point was already pre-addressed in the blog post because it’s so predictable that some would completely miss the point. GitHub’s downtime isn’t about stopping you from writing code on your own machine.
> Hashimoto’s comments sound disturbed and I hope he finds some peace, but if he wasn’t who he was and you read these comments, you’d think this person had a problem. So, I think he does.
What a gross ad hominem about someone’s mental health. Please don’t do this.
Honestly, I thought you were demeaning him to defend GitHub. But after reading the article, it does seem like his emotional reaction is not aligned with the situation. Just saying it openly for others who get the same impression I did.
That said, GitHub can be a full time job for many (handling and responding issues, reviews, and so on, depending on the size of the project). It's also not unheard of to have PR descriptions and comments as part of documentation rather than commit messages. So GitHub's availability is certainly extremely disruptive to many companies.
> “Some people doom scroll social media. I've been doom scrolling GitHub issues since before that was a word,” he admitted. “On vacations I'd have bookmarks of different projects on GitHub I wanted to study. Not just source code, but OSS processes, how other maintainers react to difficult situations. Etc. Believe it or not, I like this.”
> “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,” he wrote.
He is a passionate person whose identity is heavily invested in community and technical achievement. He's upset about his world being disrupted, not that GitHub as a product is failing him. This is how high-performing people are - they care deeply about their work. Could you imagine leveling these charges at a visual artist when they complain about a company messing with their favorite pencil? Or a saxophonist when their reed of choice is discontinued? It's petty and reductionist.
If that person is lashing out and hurting people around him as a consequence, then yeah, I'd say that's not healthy. Unless he has a smaller barrier than I do for what he considers lashing out, and just refers to online complains.
As place to run test? Build your own infrastructure. It's easier than ever. Why rely on blackboxes to do that?
I'm not saying this is horrible advice, but I think it conveniently ignores some major reasons people prefer cloud infrastructure in the first place.
Building your own infrastructure is the (relatively) easy part. Maintaining it, ensuring everything is patched, passing compliance audits, dealing with your own outages (I find it a bit ironic when everyone complains about cloud downtime, as if self hosted infrastructure has 99.999% uptime) is the expensive part. I'm not saying it's that hard to do, but once you get to a certain size it requires dedicated staff to manage, which is expensive.
In fact, if GitHub Actions were more reliable, I would hardly see any reason at all to host your own test infrastructure for most companies. The only reason hosting your own is more attractive is because GH Actions has such poor uptime.
I mostly work on my own projects, and keep many things private. I switched to a privately hosted gitea. I'm fairly happy with it.
Such a one punch sentence that distills the message with a little bit of dramatic flair.
got damn, anyone got recommendations on how to write like a journalist ?
The rest of the article can be AI generated, don't fret about it.
It’s an intellectual and creative exercise that I kind of enjoy.
the fake surprise is so fake
GitHub’s mandated transfer to Azure was on hold for quite a while, Azure needed to be upgraded to handle them. Then the migration started, a multi-year effort, then the LLMs got integrated.
If you slap a 2.5 year window onto those phases you end up around a decade. That’s Enterprise timing, not slow motion.
And, critically, this is not some new emergent phenomenon today. Orgs are pulling the plug noticeably now because of massive service failures. The reputational damage has been growing over time.
Management changed, dumbish things happened, and consequences are rolling out. Even MS didn’t push the direct changes causing the issues (they did), they are responsible for avoiding and alleviating them (they didn’t). Change propagation takes time bound by the medium of transmission.
They're part of a trillion(!!!)-dollar company and want to be an essential part of SW dev workflow. They ought to act like it.
- forgejo [1] is working on ForgeFed [2], an extension of ActivityPub (the protocol made popular by Mastodon)
- tangled is built on top of ATproto (the protocol behind Bluesky) [3]
- radicle is rolling their own protocol, more peer-to-peer than federated [4]
- fossil is a broader all-in-one solution: not only a new Version Control System (a replacement for git), but also a forge (has the features of a forge: issues (bug-tracking), PRs, comments, wikis, ...) [5]
The other self-hosted forges such as gitlab, sourcehut, gitea don't have such a high level of decentralization and resilience. It does not make them less good, they are solving different problems, mainly being a easy-to-use self-hosted alternative to proprietary forges. For instance Gitea has Gitea Actions, which is designed to be compatible with GitHub Actions [6], while I don't think running CI/CD workflow in a decentralized way will the priority of projects like tangled or radicle.
[1] https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo
[2] https://forgefed.org/
[3] https://tangled.org/
[4] https://radicle.dev/guides/protocol#federation-vs-peer-to-pe...
[5] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
[6] https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview
I used to run a git server for all my main projects, and mirrored public ones on GitHub. Then the convenience of GitHub lured me in, to the point I shut down my private git server 5 years ago.
Now I kinda regret that decision.
I don't use their SaaS offering, but I've been using the self-hosted versions (mostly in CE flavours, but occasionally paid) since the days of the weird black and white fox, when gitlab looked very bootstrap-y. (The logo in question for the curious, but you can't unsee it: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Gitlab_l... )
Anyway, since LLMs for coding became a thing, coupled with the realities of running a business post-IPO, it's been a slow-ish downward trend for the self-hoster, as their offering gets more and more bloat that's likely easier to manage at scale for Gitlab, but stands in stark contrast to what it once was.
Little things are pilling up; components left for dead (we now have both TODO - which is an abysmal mess, and "assigned work items" - WHY?!), issue boards that remain messy, advertisements creeping into the CE version, increasingly wild hardware requirements... and some recent changes to their documentation that strike me as a dark pattern; very much a recognition that either you're an enterprise running your own paid GitLab, with some kind of support, or you're a SaaS user and don't GAF about the ops docs.
The transition to websockets was annoying. Mostly because it kinda-doesn't work and there's no decent polling fallback, which results in time wasted hitting refresh, in 2026, when everything worked fine from 201x-2025.
I've kept my eye out for alternatives, but Gitlab's CI/CD, and the self hosted runners, is still my preferred flavour hands down and continues to be the reason I stick around.
Overall, it's a much slower decline, but like all stock-market-centric companies, you can feel the writing on the wall. Nevertheless, we're in the middle of a Gitlab migration from one cloud provider to anther because we still haven't found something better. :/
Can someone explain what exactly is so bad now that leaving it entirely to use some new platform, even spinning up your own servers, is a reasonable alternative?
So much so that they stopped posting uptime metrics for a while on their status page and an independent 3rd party created a website just for this:
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/ (not my website)
According to that website, which unsurprisingly reports a lower number than what Github themselves claim, Github uptime is down to ~86%.
And if you work in the space, you know how terrible that is, but even more so for such a critical piece of infrastructure.
Yes, because it throws all partial outages into one bucket, which is a dumb idea because the bigger a platform becomes with more loosely coupled components the more untainable high uptime number become.
Looking through the incidents, a good portion of them are regarding Copilot and Codespaces, two products I couldn't care about less. I do also have my regular run-ins with Github outages, but that website is just hyperbolic.
The truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.
And not sure how your individual preferences invalidate others' experiences with the platform. To be frank Copilot is likely one of their most visible and in-demand products as it was a very cost-effective way to access frontier models (and are unsurprisingly nerfing usage limits in a month).
When they changed the PR view to not display all the changes at once, was the moment I said "I really need to find something else", not only is the platform very unreliable (at least from Spain), but most product changes they do are making the platform less efficient for me as a developer to use.
> Can someone explain what exactly is so bad now that leaving it entirely to use some new platform, even spinning up your own servers, is a reasonable alternative?
It always was, but network-effect of GitHub been large. But seemingly not infinite, at one point people start favoring "Being able to access platform" over "people can star my repository" it seems.
Most random errors in Github Actions (e.g. jobs just randomly failing or getting stuck and requiring a manual restart, or just being plain slow) also never show up on the Github Status page. The Github Actions VMs are also so slow that I'm seriously pondering setting up a cheap throw-away laptop at home as runner, that would easily be 10x faster. But then we're at playing IT admin at home :/
And the most recent bug is "we added random code to some PR and some PR became invisible" which is a wtf bug which should be impossible to exist.
27th April 2026: Starting June 1, your Copilot usage will consume GitHub AI Credits.
28th April 2026: An update on GitHub availability
28th April 2026:Securing the git push pipeline bla bla bla critical remote code vulnerability bla bla bla
In particular the GitHub availability is interesting. When I read it, it almost sounded like a plea to "believe in us still, guys!!!". If you then read what the ghostty author wrote, something between the blog post from GitHub, and the outside world, no longer matches. GitHub is like on the titanic, they see the iceberg part above water and say "nothing to see here, this ship is invincible" (aka AI is invincible). Meanwhile everyone else already jumps off the ship ...
Get these folks off Azure and Cosmos DB (or whatever MSFT forces them to use) to something real and maybe you'd have a shot
Blizzcon canceled. All of its IP barely got any love.
See what players think about the latest World of Warcraft patch. It's absolutely shit and broken. People say they fired the entire QA department since a few years back and since then the quality has just gone down.
They buy those businesses because they have nothing to do with that free cash flow, and for accounting reasons it makes sense to have them.
They didn't buy those businesses to develop it further and make it worth more.
Github will just become ever more irrelevant.
The key issue is that the US governments let those huge monopolies exist, and then use their money to buy other businesses and enshiftify them.
Unless that changes in the US, this will continue happening.
https://blizzcon.com/en-us/event/
Crazy to me that the loot tables are still broken for some players/characters, they've tried to fix it several times now, and it's still not working - Since (some) endgame gear can only be obtained this way they've effectively soft locked those players/character out of the endgame.
Context: Some players are always receiving the same drops i.e. a belt. Rather than a varied loot table that gives them a chance to get items they need.
I think Diablo Immortal was likely the biggest success Blizz provided there