GitHub Was Never About the Source Code

With GitHub down once again, I decided to write this long-overdue blog post.

This was the top comment on Hacker News when I started writing this:

For a variety of reasons, we had a centralized place where everyone of a particular set of persuasions could connect, and this had outside benefits for the community as a whole. That place is becoming untenable, and with the loss of goodwill and stability, the community’s started to dissipate. But those emergent features like a core community and default expectation of where you can find someone will fade. And that is a very real loss for all of us.

That resonates sooo much with me. GitHub has never been about the source code. It’s where I hang out with friends, see what they’ve built, and discover all the cool projects they star. It’s the only “Facebook” I still visit. There is no other place like it anymore.

GitHub is on its way out, and the community around it is starting to crumble. My feed basically consists of the same two people starring repos and being really “active.” The rest is just noise. (I wish I could show you a screenshot, but, well, GitHub is down.)

“AI” has only accelerated this trend. These days, you’re lucky to get a pull request from a real human being. Discussing changes is no longer fun when you’re talking to a bot 90% of the time.

I hope someone builds a community for developers; we need one now more than ever.

The way I see it, our code could live anywhere. We could share stars, comments, and project updates through a common network, similar to Keybase or Mastodon.

Send me an email if you like the idea.