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Comment by agile-gift0262 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with many of OP's points, but I don't think OP is addressing the suggestion of using Codeberg, which I believe is a reasonable alternative to GitHub.

It provides a GitHub-like experience, so it solves the OP's problems with SourceHut.

Regarding discoverability, I doubt anyone finds projects through GitHub's search or discoverability features, but rather through a search engine like Google or DDG and online communities. So the project should be similarly discoverable if the source was in Codeberg.

The main friction point I can see is that many won't have a Codeberg user, so they'd need to sign up in order to collaborate, while most already have a GitHub account.

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> Regarding discoverability, I doubt anyone finds projects through GitHub's search or discoverability features, but rather through a search engine like Google or DDG and online communities.

I've found a lot of interesting projects via GitHub search and via GitHub newsfeed (mostly because I follow people with similar interests and they star interesting projects). Google links to discussions in places like online communities, which works quite well too, but Google doesn't seem to rank GitHub very high on search results, even when looking for the exact project name.

Codeberg supports account creation and sign-in with GitHub login, so there really are no excuses IMO.

One extra click for any existing GitHub user to comment on a Codeberg repo.

>Codeberg supports account creation and sign-in with GitHub login, so there really are no excuses IMO. One extra click for any existing GitHub user to comment on a Codeberg repo.

Your simplification of the steps is incorrect. I just did this "sign-in with Github" workflow and it's not just 1 click. After using Github to authorize Codeberg, it still requires new users to enter a valid email. Codeberg then requires verification of that email address by the user clicking on the url in the email.

(And the email address step above also adds more behind-the-scene steps for me since I always create email aliases for every service to manage spam.)

Not sure what friction is removed by signing in with Github rather than just registering a new account email address directly with Codeberg.

Not having to set another password. That is the biggest PITA that makes people groan when creating new accounts.

Passwordless FIDO2 is of course the best solution, not OIDC.

The typical GitHub project I end up using as a tool or a dependency: hundreds to thousands of stars, a good number of issues and PRs, signaling at least a moderate degree of battle-hardening. (Star farming is a thing but I don’t think it’s a big problem in general.)

The typical GitLab project I land on through a search engine: ~0 stars, extremely low issue/MR engagement. Even when it’s like the only game in town for a moderately popular use case. Hardly distinguishable from my private repos in terms of human involvement.

Codeberg is only going to be worse.

Not many, but I discovered projects, that I use daily, through GitHub's seemingly new "Trending" section.

Given the sad state of affairs with search engines these days I most often go straight to github for code related searches.

And, as much as I hate websites profiling me, I discovered plenty of emacs packages I use every day from github suggestions.

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