My top-of-funnel is not searching github but recommendations or searching technology/platform specific repositories e.g. for software it's flathub/f-droid and for rust its crates.io/libs.rs.
Where the code is hosted is in theory irrelevant... but I'm ashamed to say that when code turns out to be on gitlab my heart sinks. It's a bit of a red flag for e.g. no bug-tracking, no contributions, no maintenance, absent maintainer and unexpected licenses.
It's gross personal hypocrisy because I hate the absurdity of commercially owned FOSS collaboration and centralised git and happily self-host myself... but those not publishing code on github are awkward bastards :)
You can have 1:1 parity with any company or product, but unless you have their word of mouth distribution and adoption, you will lose. Every time.
People in aggregate, as crowds, are relatively static and inflexible. Once they learn a fact once, it sticks. You cannot unteach that without lifting metaphorical mountains. The first mover with escape velocity wins.
The amount of energy needed to undo that is massive.
You'll have fringe 0.01%ers adopt some other tool, but they'll never carry enough gravitas to bring the entire network with them.
Anecdotal evidence:
- Github, Facebook, and Reddit have never been unseated
- Instagram has never been replaced, only supplemented
- Twitter/X has only lost steam due to extremely bad press, an unwanted name change, and a huge effort from Meta (which leveraged traffic and synergy from Instagram). And even then, it's still well within the public zeitgeist. Bluesky and Mastodon didn't even make dents.
- Google has never been displaced (granted, Google pays a lot of money to maintain defaults and maintain a web "pane of glass" monopoly, redefine the address bar as a search bar, etc.)
Just because I use Codeberg doesn't mean Github should die. Just because I never ever visit Facebook doesn't mean you should stop using it.
Why can't we all just play nice?
This is why VCs won't fund consumer. It's frothy, fickle, and the incumbents have saturated the network effects market. And that totally sucks.
I'm a believer in strong antitrust and that a fire every decade or so clears the forest of dead growth and renews the ecosystem. Evolution and reinvention staves off ossification. Instead of working on hyper-optimization of things like better ad targeting in search of more growth, we're working on more important problems and lifting bigger weights.
More startups means better compensation for ICs and innovators. Rewards for capital risk rather than extremely large wealth funds and pension plans.
Look at your Fords and Boeings. Totally stagnant. Newer international competition is refreshing and energized.
Or Google of just two years ago, before they had their "come to Jesus" moment. Where they witnessed visions of the loss of their single largest cash flow flashing before their eyes.
Except GitHub, maybe.
Granted, the replaced services were nowhere near the popularity levels of the current ones, and have made horrible decision.
This was pre-broadband penetration, pre-smartphone. That was a really different era.
Social networking wasn't really that big before Facebook. Friendster, MySpace, and Xanga were all niche communities.
> Except GitHub, maybe.
Github toppled SourceForge, which was awful.
Reddit is probably the player that unseated the closest peer competitor. It toppled Digg, which was pretty big at the time. (Digg had itself disrupted Slashdot, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us, but those were niche communities.)
https://tangled.sh is the other contender in this space that I know of. uses atproto (same as bluesky) under the hood.
fundamentally activitypub is insufficient to define these kind of networks. you'd need to have some sort of object-capability representation. the creators of forgefed are also moving in this direction: https://codeberg.org/Playwright/playwright
At some point I made very tiny contributions to OSS projects that had their own Gitlab hosted instances.
Sure a password manager makes it tolerable, but what about having an anonymous way of opening up PRs (subject to owner moderation of course)?
Use the author name and email for a virtual identity and when the PR request is accepted (not merged) force an email address validation for the PRer so that comment interaction can happen via email.
Fork the original repo onto your forge. Your forge could be your own forgejo instance, your own GitLab instance, just a plain git repo, or even Github if you like it so much.
Then send a note to the original authors informing them of your fork and the patch you wrote. Request that they review your work and pull it into their repo if they approve of it.
You don't need an account on their forge and they don't need an account on your forge.
Disregarding the fact that I would need to have a way to reliably find the contact information, the review process would probably take place outside the source code platform.
You have a point about the review process. How much of a moat do you want around your project? You want to keep spammers out. But that creates hurdles.
I was trying to interact with the Trunk project the other day. But they required me to create accounts on multiple services just to get in the game. When you need a Github account and a Discord account and... You know what? Nevermind. It's too much effort just to be nice and inform you of an issue with your project.
I totally understand that putting a public email address out there creates a huge burden for them. I suppose if I value a product enough I will accept some smaller burden and take the load off them. But most of the time I don't value a product enough to allow the authors to offload their burden onto me. Conversely, they don't value my input enough to accept the huge burden it would take them to allow me to interact with them.
The forge could automatically figure out if the submitted repo was a fork, figure out the sequence of commits in the foreign repo that diverged from itself, analyze the commit comments and commit diffs to see if they jived, and add the PR if it passed the spam filter.
Then you could submit PRs without an account or even having the contact information of a maintainer.
Similar for indexes of open source repos - I dont know of a singlar winner now but it was for a bit freshmeat for a feed of open source project updates