GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere?

isoprophlex

What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now, anyway? Microsoft bundling? Name recognition? That it's still the goto place for open source? Existing corpo contracts? - githubs' ci/cd has been pretty crap for me personally (ok there's worse out there but it's definitely not a joyful thing) - The user interface I hate more and more each year. - The availability, well... there's still two nines in there lol - the CLI is not bad, i don't hate that

nerdypepper

we need to break free from monocultures: https://blog.tangled.org/federation/

everyday7732

Would a diaspora from GitHub be that bad? I don't see particularly big benefits from having every project being hosted in one place. Monopolies with network effects tend to enshittify.

ghewgill

Yes, let's look beyond centralized services for source control (also known as "developer social media"). For example, Forgejo is working on federation ( https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m... ) which makes the choice of where to host your code less relevant, because anybody on the federated network will be able to interact with any other repository no matter where it is hosted. The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.

felipeheredia

I really want to move my personal code away from GitHub, but I really don't know an alternative that will be as good as GitHub to serve as a Portfolio and a good service. Maybe Codeberg or GitLab, I really don't know

minraws

For community projects it's hard to manage user accounts and stuff.

imnes

If the problem really stems from capacity issues and the unexpected growth rate, maybe the way forward is further limiting / throttling capacity to free tier users, and increased costs for paid users to allow more expansion (in compute / personnel). Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.

pcan77

Nah, it's great for coffee breaks IMO. Not everything needs to be perfect. Honestly every dev I know rejoices when GH goes down because it gives them a much needed and deserved break lol.

ChrisArchitect

Recently: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365 Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611

jurassic

Today everyone's talking about the availability problems, but GitHub has a much bigger problem which is that its way of modeling work is not aligned with how people need to work with agents. I think the social value of GitHub has always been really overblown, and now it's actually an Achilles heel. Now that we know prompt injection is such a massive risk, it seems insane to allow members of the public to leave comments on issues and pull requests that your agents may see. Which means the way that open source interacts with the public needs to fundamentally change away from the open GitHub model and towards a model of trusted contribution only. Feedback from the public has to come through carefully monitored channels that we can be sure our agents are not gonna pick up and run with. Public comment has to be kept totally segregated from our trusted work queue, which is how many people treat GitHub issues. We just simply can't have people, including malicious actors, able to drop a comment any and everywhere they want. I'm honestly astonished that GitHub hasn't even taken the most basic step of allowing you to create a read-only public repository with no commenting functionality.

ahouronthis

There's molecule.arweave.net, which makes Arweave (decentralized permanent storage) a git remote, and generates a wallet identity on first run. Good for agents to collaborate on branches without UI-based fiddling.