[markerz]

Are we using GitHub differently? I don’t understand how the social network part of GitHub has to do with having your code discoverable and to discover.

I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually. It’s always through finding the product first and trying to find the source code. If the source code is on some other website, I’ll probably figure it out, but it’s be a new muscle. Same with making an issue or a PR. The barrier is higher but not so high that I wouldn’t complain about a bug.

If anything, I find the social tools on GitHub like PR reviews, issue management, and notifications to be terrible for their job. Perfectly fine for a 1 person project and absolutely awful for a team.

[cedws]

Yes, I think many people use GitHub just for code storage, and that's fine.

I casually browse GitHub sometimes in the same way I do HN. I follow friends and colleagues and through the feed see what they're building and starring. I use global search to find tools and libraries that do what I want.

Sometimes, I come across a repo I like that's on say GitLab, but not GitHub. I quickly forget about such projects because they live in my bookmarks instead of my stars list.

>I find the social tools on GitHub like PR reviews, issue management, and notifications

I don't consider these social features, at least not in the way I'm talking about.

[dijit]

> I’ve never stumbled upon a project by browsing GitHub casually.

Same.

The “discoverability” of github is two things:

1) Recognition of the name; so if I cannot find the source code and I believe something to be open source I will google the product name with “github”.

2) I can reasonably expect everyone to have an account, so getting issues and PRs is less effort than with other forges.

But I’ve practically never discovered some new FOSS from githubs social features, and I actually look at my friends activity feeds.

[Groxx]

Yeah, 2 is all I really care about. First-party discovery systems are almost always bad imo.

And every time I think about it for more than a second, I get mad that OpenID got eaten by OAuth.

[dijit]

I’m still mad that Mozillas persona got no adoption.

I’m sure it was imperfect, but in theory it was easy to host and easy to implement. :(

[Groxx]

Completely agreed, it had essentially everything I wanted out of such a system. I think they would've nailed it if they had just integrated it into the browser / an extension, and I'm baffled that they left it in such an awkward state for the full run - almost smells like intentional burying.

Revocation was hard, but it's not like existing systems are solving that in practice either, and you can get a long way by just keeping short leases (which is fine because nothing needs to communicate with any third party).

If passkeys weren't so blatantly DRM-friendly I might like those, but they seem intentionally human-hostile for no good reason at all.

[ipaddr]

You've have never typed: language, project type into the search bar and found countless projects and reviewed a few to find something that matches what you wanted. You've never clicked on who someone is following and found really cool repos? I'm always surprised by the useful projects I never thought would exist.

[markerz]

Yeah. I've never done that. I can see the value in it, though.

Personally, I do a Kagi search, or I make an LLM do it for me.

I highly prefer word-of-mouth recommendations like Reddit, HackerNews, or Lobsters. It's quite easy to browse threads where people mention hating some package and switching to something else. It's also a lot easier to see gamified posts (astroturfing), whereas it's really hard to judge projects on GitHub. So many forks are distractions, and stars mean so little. As such, I highly value a personal blog post.

Similarly, I look at what the projects I find link to. They'll often be "inspired by" another project, or a rewrite in a different language. It's a great way to see how different creators consider trade-offs between different projects.

I only browse someone's GitHub when I see an insightful blog post, and I want to learn more about the author and what they work on. Usually I close that tab within 10 seconds cause I can't be bothered to figure out which of their 100 repos is interesting.

My best analogy is that GitHub is the TripAdvisor/Yelp/Google Reviews of finding a good restaurant. Those platforms have been gamified aggressively. The signal is low, and you can't flatten judgement of a restaurant into a 1-5 star scale. Your best bet is to find opinions tied to real people that aren't tied to points.

[PaywallBuster]

if I'm language agnostic, i'm not browsing package manager websites for software, i'm searching on github