[LinXitoW]

Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better.

Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.

[goku12]

Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github.

I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).

[andybak]

Ideally this should be something search engines handle - but they do a poor job in specialised areas like code repos.

It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you).

One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure.

The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?

[goku12]

> The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?

Lemmy seems to do a decent enough job at global searches. It's most likely just a mastodon problem.

[kelnos]

I don't think I ever find new software through github's own search. I find them through the software's website or some other means like a search engine.

[account42]

I have not once searched for projects on GitHub specifically, it's always just a general web search or a referral from another website/forum/person.

[skydhash]

That was solved by forums, tech mailing lists,... If you were interested in something, you hang around the communities and almost everything that was interesting enough will pass by.

[goku12]

Do you hang around every forum or mailing list that discusses the solutions to problems that you may potentially encounter in the future? The type of problem I'm talking about isn't one that can be foreseen years in advance.

[throwaway28731]

> How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there?

Word of mouth. Package managers. Search engines. Your LLM of choice.

Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?

[goku12]

Word of mouth: What if it's just some random script a guy created in a weekend? I have my code used by others in such a manner.

Package managers: Same problem as above. You missed the point of free software.

Search engines: They do a disastrous job of indexing anything on a forge. You might as well yell at the clouds instead.

LLM of choice: I'm not taking this seriously.

> Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?

I don't even understand the point of such questions. None of the solutions you proposed are any better solving what I described than the insufficient method I wrote about.