The success and growth of Mastodon proves that this model works, particularly for people who identify as being developers.
Is it possible to create mirrors of every repo with no Microsoft dependency or until someone else acquires GitHub from Microsoft and makes it more reliable (maybe Elon Musk like he did with Twitter)? This can solve for commit/push/pull when GitHub is down, but not for Pull requests and reviews.
- 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
plus, it's a huge headache to run and not very profitable. github mostly makes money on ci/cd, but a github alternative wouldn't benefit from that: anyone migrating would inherently evaluate other ci/cd vendors. plus, github eats a ton of network egress, which is very expensive. the only people who could eat the cost are the other clouds: gcp, aws, cloudflare, etc. but it feels dubiously beneficial for them.
Also, observe that the competitors all copied it's UI. And on a case-by-case basis, they have drawbacks of their own.
Even if you switch away from GitHub, you’re probably going to use it for something else anyway. There will be some dependency or something that’s still on there or you might use it for discovery. Then you have to spend time and money migrating to something else for what? Comparable features and interface? Maybe avoid a few minutes of downtime every month? Migrating a team might cost the equivalent of years of downtime. Or host it yourself to spend more of your own time and maybe get a worse result?
Really, what does downtime cost anyway when you are using a distributed version control system? It’s not like you don’t have access to the code. You might not have access to issues or CI for a few minutes. So what? It’s annoying, but is switching really worth it?
And what else is out there? Gitlab? Gitea? BTW, that’s the dumbest name ever for a product. I wouldn’t use it just so I don’t have to say that word. Are either of those enough of an improvement to justify the time? Or host Forgejo? Now you’re in the hosting business and only have yourself to blame when it inevitably goes down.
It’s easier to just use GitHub even if GitHub isn’t great.
* Free CI, especially Mac & Windows.
Find my a competitor that offers that. Until then I think their uptime is going to have to get a lot worse before the majority care.
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.
Why would you do such a thing?
Even if you didn't have an agent work off public issues, there's nothing stopping a malicious user from dropping a comment on your pull request. If an auto-fix agent read that comment and incorrectly took action on it, you're hosed. That's exactly the story we saw today with Snowflake.
Yes, I’m curious just how much of the scaling issues might be self-inflicted.
Also I’d like to see the distribution of usage. I’m guessing a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives