GitHub Is Sinking

Users say the once-loved code giant is glitchy, bloated, and giving sinking-ship energy

TLDR: A furious blog post says GitHub has become unreliable and overstuffed, pushing users to consider alternatives or even leave entirely. In the comments, some blame Microsoft, others blame the flood of AI-generated code, but almost everyone agrees the site feels worse — and that matters because so much of the software world depends on it.

The internet’s developer crowd is in full break glass, grab lifeboat mode over claims that GitHub — the hugely popular site where people store and share code — has gone from beloved essential to buggy corporate mess. The article itself is a flamethrower, blaming Microsoft for turning the platform into a bot-filled, AI-fueled “slop graveyard,” and urging everyone to remember that GitHub is not the same thing as Git, the underlying open-source tool. Translation for normal people: you can leave the website without giving up the way code is managed.

But the real fireworks are in the comments. One user said they simply clicked to view a project’s history and got hit with a rate limit message, which is the online equivalent of being told to “please stop looking.” Another commenter cackled at the article’s savage description of GitLab as the kind of bloated option that “impress[es] your boss” and requires “multiple meetings” just to choose. And then came the old-guard doomers: one person said they’ve been warning for six years that putting everything on one giant platform was a bad idea, while another compared GitHub’s decline to the sad fall of SourceForge, a previous big-name code site.

Not everyone agrees on the villain, though. One cooler-headed reply argued this may be less about Microsoft being evil and more about AI exploding the amount of code being uploaded, overwhelming everything downstream. So the community drama has split neatly into two camps: “Microsoft ruined it” versus “AI traffic melted it.” Either way, the vibe is unmistakable: panic, dark jokes, and a whole lot of people suddenly shopping for the exits.

Key Points

  • The article argues that GitHub’s uptime and overall reliability have worsened and links that decline to Microsoft ownership.
  • It emphasizes that Git is an open-source, distributed version-control system that does not require GitHub or any centralized host.
  • The piece presents GitHub Actions and hosted CI dependencies as risky if platform reliability is uncertain.
  • The article recommends migrating to alternatives including Codeberg, Tangled, Gitea, GitLab, Bitbucket, and potentially Game of Trees, Radicle, and Sourcehut.
  • It also proposes self-hosting with Forgejo, Gitea, or GitLab, or using Git directly over SSH as a non-forge option.

Hottest takes

"hit a secondary rate limit and need to wait" — oarsinsync
"This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice" — tbolt
"We’ve all been there m8" — summa_tech
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