Hacker News Reader

The solution for centralization isn't asking people to put the extra effort to avoid it. You won't convince anyone to accept that. Unless you have a unified interface to search all those projects at once - especially unfinished or unpublished projects, people will keep going back to platforms like github. That unified interface doesn't have to be centralized at all either.

View on HN

> Unless you have a unified interface to search all those projects at once…

You mean like Google? I can’t imagine ever searching just GitHub for software… I use a search engine and it’ll point me to GitHub or Gitlab or whatever frontend the software is published on.

I also find GitHub’s intra-project search to be so horrible that’s it’s quicker in the long run to just clone the project to my local machine and git grep there. And at least my local git doesn’t inexplicably choose to hide a few relevant results from me the way GitHub constantly does.

I wasn't talking about intra-project searches. But Github does have a search that allows us to put constraints on the results like how web search engines allowed a decade or more ago. This feature is pretty useful that it forms a big part of sourcegraph's business. I do use Google search, but I often end up with Github search when I need to locate a specific type of project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com