I’ve seen a few posts recently lamenting GitHub’s current downfall1. While I can’t deny that I understand the sentiment, I must admit that I don’t share in the least. I’m glad that GitHub is finally starting to fall apart.
Around 12 years ago I used Facebook because a lot of people who I knew from real life used it as their sole communication platform, and offline groups coordinated their activities exclusively through it. I didn’t enjoy using it, quite the contrary, I tolerated it as a means to an end.
For the longest time, GitHub has felt like Facebook. A platform that I have to deal with because I want to collaborate with projects hosted there. I contribute to them despite being hosted at GitHub, not because of it. I don’t rant to project authors about it either; I stay polite and focused, reserving my opinion to myself unless it’s relevant to the topic at hand.
I won’t deny that GitHub had many good aspects unique to it, and these are precisely why it managed to centralise so much of the open-source ecosystem. The pull request UI was neat — especially as someone who’d only seen Gerrit before that. The general space of interfaces for reviewing patches was and remains unexplored, compared to its full potential.
Before GitHub, I hosted my own Git repositories on an OpenBSD VPS. Git worked perfectly well that way; GitHub didn’t invent distributed collaboration, it merely wrapped it in a convenient web-based interface.
Yet, Github, a proprietary, centralised platform, stands in stark contrast to everything that open source and community collaboration stands for. Of course, their propaganda material is carefully crafted to portray the opposite opinion, and they no doubt have specialists making the right choice to ensure that this is the image they reflect at a surface level.
It’s hard to believe that they’d deeply care and love open source and community collaboration if their core activity is to push for a product that is both proprietary and centralised. I struggle to think of a more obvious contradiction. It reminds me of Facebook stating that they “care about your privacy”. They definitely care about it, just not in the way you’d expect and not about respecting your privacy.
I’m grateful to whomever is making GitHub crash and burn from the inside2. It’s finally making people in the open source community actually consider using open source platforms — even if for the wrong reasons. Honestly, I hope that “the network effect” works both ways.
E.g.: Before GitHub, by Armin Ronacher, Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub, by Mitchell Hashimoto, and GitHub is sinking by David Bushell. ↩︎
I do sympathise with those who’ve worked hard truly believing in that they were bringing about improvement for the community. Please understand that this is not a personal attack on them. ↩︎