[malicka]

If people want to find software, they search GitHub. If you self-host a forge, no one will ever find your software unless you’re a preestablished big name (like Blender). To avoid throwing your code into the void, you’re pretty much forced to mirror with GitHub, at least.

To avoid this and make smaller forges as a block a viable competitor, there needs to be a singular network that solves discoverability and lets you find software from any host – like ForgeFed would.

There’s also the concern with the friction created by requiring newbies to log-into a dedicated forge for contributions (which ForgeFed solves), but I reckon that’s a secondary and related concern.

[nightpool]

This is an indexing problem, not a federation problem. Personally, if I want to find software, I use Google, Rubygems, or NPM. Github is a distant third option. But this project is about data interchange between forges. It doesn't solve the indexing / discoverability problem.

Having a better code search crawler that can grab data from independent git repos would be really cool. But being able to submit a PR from server 1 to server 2 is pretty unrelated to that.

[tcfhgj]

> If people want to find software, they search GitHub.

people really do that?

[Klonoar]

The only time I ever search GitHub is when I'm trying to debug or understand some esoteric API (usually Apple-specific) and I'm looking for anybody else who has actually used the god damned thing.

If I'm looking for software/libs/etc, GitHub search is the absolute last thing I would even think to look for.