GitHub Has an Availability Problem. Is It Time to Look Elsewhere? | Hacker News Reader

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

dhruv2038.bearblog.dev

64 pointsdhruv300631 comments

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.

Is Mastodon successful?

(copy paste hedged definition of success)

Depends on how carefully selected and considered your criterion for success is.

It accomplished what it set out to do, which was not "make obscene piles of money" but since they didn't make obscene piles of money it probably is a failure anyway, right?

A peak of 2.6 million active users 4 years ago and the decline since then to 750k users is a true success story, right?

That's what I meant by carefully selected and ill-thought-out criterion.

They didn't set out with the goal of making gobs of money or subsuming the entire online population, and because those things didn't happen, success is tautologically ruled out, right? After all, as we all know, the only kind of success that is even theoretically possible is being the best and only player left alive in your field. Literally anything less is failure, unqualified and unequivocal.

Mastodon did what they set out to do and there's a vibrant community around it. That's a success, even if it doesn't meet narrow-minded silicon valley definitions of success.

Git is meant to be a dvcs (distributed version control system) and I remember doing this in the early days of Git to point to any remote when the central repository or provider was down.

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.

I just hate Microsoft and used to love GitHub. I can understand why Github is down with the current insane rates of Commits, PRs, Agents calling GH CLI etc and I hope they find a way back to 3 9s availability.

Are you saying Elon Musk made Twitter more reliable? Because he absolutely didn't. He actually abruptly removed Twitter servers from a data center after being told not to by the people who actually understood how twitter worked and that had the IP addresses hard coded all over Twitter code and this caused a lot of outages.

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

* Free private repos

* 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.

> What is GH's remaining long-term moat right now

180,000,000 monthly active users

Community; network effects.

Also, observe that the competitors all copied it's UI. And on a case-by-case basis, they have drawbacks of their own.

> still two nines

Unfortunately, as a codeberg user, codeberg doesn't have 2 9s...

i wonder if it's just an unappealing business to compete with. it's like walmart: no one likes walmart, but it's unappealing to compete with them in small-town america.

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.

Probably network effects, integration, just about everyone knows how to use it, high switching cost, the fact that it’s mostly good enough, etc.

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.

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.

Feels a bit like the eletricity outage in spain where people had a brief moment where they actually got off the internet phone and enjoyed real-life.

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

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.

This is only a problem if you have agents working from public comments and issues.

Why would you do such a thing?

There's currently no way to have a private issue queue associated with a public project. This is exactly the sort of structural problem with the product that I'm talking about. They make it very easy to do dangerous things and very hard, if not impossible, to work securely.

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.

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.

> Get rid of some of the baked in Co-Pilot integrations that might be compounding the extra workloads.

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.

> a relatively small portion of accounts are responsible for the majority of load.

Probably 20/80 (Pareto) principle.

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

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

For portfolio and service only, virtually any GH alternative discussed here will do it. Even a self-hosted cgit or static page git browser will do it for read-only.

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.

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.

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

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