Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.
I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).
It's helpful to have a github mirror of your "real" repo (or even just a stub pointing to the real repo if you object to github strongly enough that mirroring there is objectionable to you).
One day maybe there will be an aggregator that indexes repos hosted anywhere. But in many ways that will be back to the square one - a single point of failure.
The Fediverse seems to dislike global search. Or is that just a mastodon thing?
Lemmy seems to do a decent enough job at global searches. It's most likely just a mastodon problem.
Word of mouth. Package managers. Search engines. Your LLM of choice.
Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?
Package managers: Same problem as above. You missed the point of free software.
Search engines: They do a disastrous job of indexing anything on a forge. You might as well yell at the clouds instead.
LLM of choice: I'm not taking this seriously.
> Does anyone seriously use GitHub search to discover new projects?
I don't even understand the point of such questions. None of the solutions you proposed are any better solving what I described than the insufficient method I wrote about.