Help encourage alternatives by trying Gitlab.com or Codeberg.org or Tangled.org or others, and please star some projects there to help motivate more options.
Self-promo links below if you would like to star a few of mine good for developers.
Codeberg isn't a viable infrastructure alternative. Its an opinionated community not a neutral host as they will delete repos based off subjective opinions on LLM usage and resource consumption. If continued hosting is dependent on moderators deciding if a project fits whatever the current philosophy is, and the whims of the moderation team, then I cannot consider it a serious choice for infrastructure.
Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
Can you suggest a viable infrastructure alternative?
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
https://tangled.org would love to have you :) We're hosted in the EU, and are free for open source, forever. Tangled is also designed to be federated from ground up, so you get to own your infra & data while still participating in an open network.
I feel like any service that is free for open source is going to struggle if it gets significant adoption and becomes a default target for hosting LLM generated code. If even MS/GitHub cannot scale to the current demand, what hope do smaller and less well-funded alternatives have?
Codeberg is one public flagship instance. They are not neutral and don't claim to be. Decisions on what to host are made via elections by e.V. members. Other platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Tangled etc.) will eventually run into this same thing as well, e.g. how GitHub responds to DMCA requests, the difference with Codeberg is that there are elections which decide on what gets hosted on the main instance. For hosting slop or running a ton of actions, the recommendation is to self-host Forgejo directly instead, meaning that you, not the e.V. pays for the consequences, and you'd use the future AP federation support for cross-instance support. Forgejo is particularly simple to self-host as well, and lots of people do it (ffmpeg, Fedora and more). That way, you get to set your own rules and e.V. election results have no effect on you.
Rather use BitBucket or GitLab really, both GitLab and BitBucket have been around nearly as long as GitHub? Apparently BitBucket and GitHub are both 2008, and GitLab is 2011. The others you mentioned could go on a whim.
Cannot even merge code, this is the limit for me. We are prioritising migration to a different platform and this time going to decouple CI - right now we have too many points of failure on one vendor.
The exponential growth they are having right now is absolutely insane. I would caution against assuming its an easy problem, or that anyone else has demonstrated an ability to handle this level of scale/growth any better.
In May they had to solve for 30x growth overnight, and I would guess its closer to 100x by now. The reality is a centralized solution like this may no longer be a viable option with the scale of code generation.
How complex is the CI migration? We’re heavily dependent on GitHub Actions and the full GitHub ecosystem by extension, but by the same token these frequent outages are destroying us.
It is not working at all, I can not load any repo pages.
Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.
That promise hasn't been kept recently.
That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.
> Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales
Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.
The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.
Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.
A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
github's value is that it has a lot of eyes and visibility for smaller projects(thought many get lost too). More and more this value is going down and that stability is getting more important. More so when the story of github these days is copilot(good or bad) and their downtime. AI is giving a lot of project owners second thoughts and being so open with an AI company too.
It's a bit of a different situation though, in many cases the unit of adoption is a team or organization that is free to switch platforms without consideration of what anyone else is doing. At this point I'm going to move my personal projects, it's not bad enough to be a priority at work yet but it's trending that way.
Whatever it is, it seems to be getting worse: started with pull requests and Actions being down, now I can't even list my repos. Might be the worst one yet.
Not sure covid was the sole driving force. A combination of MS taking over and deciding to move it to Azure, a massive increase in traffic due to ai usage (not that this should be an excuse for a platform that should be scaleable), and Github going all in on AI usage to write its own code.
They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.
While it annoys me how things have gone downhill, I think you missing one key detail with regards to competition. It's only "very easy" if you feel like throwing enough money at CI compute to power the majority of the open source ecosystems needs. That would be the bare minimum in order to even have a shot of achieving similar levels of network effects as Github.
I don't have data for it, but I have been a Github user since 2012 and have found it to be down often for pretty much that entire time. I always figured it's cultural to a degree–new features always seem pretty buggy/underbaked, and often continue to long term but remain unloved and incomplete.
I has never been so bad as in the couple last years. And it's getting worse.
I never had to wonder if Steam is going to be working today, so I could play my game after work, but it's been an issue with GitHub since covid. At least for me.
Fortunately, due the nature of the service, I can sit out most downtimes. Most of the time at least.
githubstatus.com has been updated with an incident now:
> Update - We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available
Aug 17, 2026 - 13:45 UTC
I thought by the near-unanimous distaste for IIS we would have learned our lesson about making Microsoft products a central part of infrastructure, but evidently I was wrong.
I shit on Microsoft a lot here, but it’s not because the workers are dumb or that all their products are “bad”, because they’re not. It’s because the company very clearly is only ever focused on “the next marketable product”, and will let their existing products rot.
You can see this with a lot of Microsoft products. Windows NT was a a pretty cool OS/kernel at its time. NTFS was a pretty neat filesystem when it was new. They employ smart people for enough time to make a big headline, then make no effort to keep those products any good.
GitHub is too important to fail, and they obviously can't fix their up-time problem. Shouldn't they open-source core and/or problematic components and ask for public to fix it? this is not sustainable. It's literally blocking development/productivity worldwide.
Do y'all have any evidence that github's recent outages are caused by slopcode rather than the significant increase in load, which is exactly what Github & MS have been claiming as the root cause?
I'm tired of these BS stories being pushed by green accounts on HN like there's some damn agenda by someone who thinks their job will be saved "if only the CEOs realized that Slopcode Bad".
I have zero investments in agentic coding; in fact, my list of investments is pretty public, so I don't really know what point you're trying to make. But creating a new account to try to defend yourself against a threat you claim to be non-existent doesn't scream "I feel secure" to me.
Self-promo links below if you would like to star a few of mine good for developers.
https://gitlab.com/architecture-decision-record
https://gitlab.com/ways-of-working
https://gitlab.com/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure
Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club
My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.
Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-dec...
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working
https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vuln...
e.g.: gh pr merge 5062 -R <org/repo> --squash --delete-branch
I'm going to leave them alone for the rest of the day.
In May they had to solve for 30x growth overnight, and I would guess its closer to 100x by now. The reality is a centralized solution like this may no longer be a viable option with the scale of code generation.
Our runners are faster, our CI is smoother than ever. Transitioning was a matter of a few hours, which we took as a fun hackaton.
Github.com's promise is that it can be the central broker of open source code because it is reliable.
That promise hasn't been kept recently.
That said, Github is hard to displace and it is similar to the era of the Twitter Fail Whales. It was a sign of growth that couldn't be properly managed but there was not viable alternative.
Hard but not impossible. Being unreliable might nudge a few people. Also, Twitter had their fail whale in their early phase (mostly), not twenty years or so into their existence.
The issue with replacing Github is that it takes more than version control and issue tracking to replace the network that is Github. It's effectively the largest social network for software developers on this planet.
Tangled (tangled.org) is built on the at protocol (bluesky) and seems like an interesting take on this. Most other solutions seem to just move the problem to another much smaller silo (gitlab, codeberg, etc) or throw out the baby with the bathwater by focusing on self hosting without attempt at networking with other instances.
A federated approach seems like it is directionally right. Tangled is far from feature complete but I like the direction and it probably is a bit more resilient against global outages like this. I'm not a user yet but I'm keeping an eye on it.
May I ask what networking with other instances brings? Git is decentralised, so it works with self-hosted instances, right?
They're struggling to maintain a single nine these days.
https://www.githubstatus.com/ is today
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-availa...
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
Enterprise works ok-ish, but the standard version has daily issue ever since.
They're making it very easy for a viable alternative to pop up and take their lunch - it just wont be Gitlab.
I never had to wonder if Steam is going to be working today, so I could play my game after work, but it's been an issue with GitHub since covid. At least for me.
Fortunately, due the nature of the service, I can sit out most downtimes. Most of the time at least.
It's a shame I had to go to HN to check if I was the only one instead of relying on their status page that they link.
> Update - We are seeing an approximate 20% error rate across numerous experiences including Pull Requests, Issues, and others. Investigations are currently under way and we will be posting updates as they become available Aug 17, 2026 - 13:45 UTC
I shit on Microsoft a lot here, but it’s not because the workers are dumb or that all their products are “bad”, because they’re not. It’s because the company very clearly is only ever focused on “the next marketable product”, and will let their existing products rot.
You can see this with a lot of Microsoft products. Windows NT was a a pretty cool OS/kernel at its time. NTFS was a pretty neat filesystem when it was new. They employ smart people for enough time to make a big headline, then make no effort to keep those products any good.
"No not like that!"
https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/github-copilot
Slop code is written and pushed ...
Aug 11, 2025: Dohmke leaves the sinking ship:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/github-ceo-thomas...
This is a true AI victory.
I'm tired of these BS stories being pushed by green accounts on HN like there's some damn agenda by someone who thinks their job will be saved "if only the CEOs realized that Slopcode Bad".
Orange account? I'm tired of the financially invested pushing their agenda. My job is secure, thanks. I don't work in the bullshit industry.