> I don't want nor need to show off ("collaborate") and if i did.. what's the point of self hosting then? Just use github/gitlab/codeberg.

Let me repeat this again. We didn't centralize git when we started using github/gitlab etc. We centralized discoverability and reach of projects.

So far, everything else can be decentralized - issue tracking, pull requests, project planning, ci, release management and more. But we still don't have a solution to search projects on potentially thousands of servers, including self-hosted ones.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> But we still don't have a solution to search projects on potentially thousands of servers, including self-hosted ones.

We do.

https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

https://npmjs.com

https://packagist.org/

https://pypi.org/

https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages

https://pkg.go.dev/

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/

And many others.

And we still have forums like this one and Reddit where people can just announce their project. Github is more of a bad code refuge than a high signal project discovery.

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franga2000 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Every single thing you showed are places to publish software releases, not post your half-finished project that someone some day might find useful. We need both.

As an example, I had to reverse engineer some kinda obscure piece of hardware and after getting everything I needed for my project, I put everything on github in case it was useful to anyone. A few months later, someone was in a similar situation and built on top of my work. Neither of us made a "package" or even "a piece of software", just some badly written scripts and a scattered notes. But it was still useful to publish somewhere where others can find it, especially a place with very good SEO and code-optimized search.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent [-]

The subject is decentralization. Your above situation could be you posting on your blog or a forum and the other person getting to know about it that way. GitHub may be convenient, but it’s neither necessary, nor indispensable!

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goku12 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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__david__ 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 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.

	▲	goku12 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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goku12 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So if I'm looking for a solution rather than a library or a project to take part in, I need to search a dozen sources to see if anything meets my requirements? What if the project was just abandoned without being published any of those source registries? What if the project was a PoC of some algorithm that didn't need to be published anywhere else?

That sounds hardly like an alternative to what's possible with Github now. The only alternative that came anywhere close to that ideal was freshmeat - and even that didn't achieve the full potential. Check this discussion alone to see how many talk about 'network effects' or 'discoverability'.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent [-]

The subject is decentralization. There’s a huge value in curation and specific communities. You don’t go to r/all to read about emacs or bash. Instead you go to r/emacs and r/bash. Even those “awesome $thing” list are better than going through pages of GitHub search results.

	▲	goku12 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		r/emacs and r/bash are all communities on a centralized service that you can search using a single interface. That is an inaccurate comparison. Meanwhile, I didn't say that a common index has to be centralized.

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ioasuncvinvaer 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

These are all for their own ecosystems and usually libraries only.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent [-]

Do you browse for C# projects when coding PHP? Do you chat about Fantasy books in a network hardware forum? It's all about ecosystems.

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ioasuncvinvaer 4 days ago | parent [-]

And Github has the whole software ecosystem. For example I can search for text editors or ebook readers. In that case I am not searching for any specific programming language.

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skydhash 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don’t care that much for Github. Because of all the clones and mirrors. So I mostly use one of the above to find the canonical project link.

And most software have an actual websites or is present in some distribution. I don’t care that much for weekend projects.

	▲	goku12 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I don’t care that much for weekend projects. We aren't talking about your preferences alone here, are we? The case that the parent commenter mentioned is exactly what I was talking about too. What if I want a solution? What if I'm looking for algorithms or examples? What if I want to find a group of projects that's tackling a certain problem? How are my needs invalid? Are the projects that don't have such elaborate setups, polish or completion unworthy of discovery and help? You're essentially dismissing requirements that drive others to large platforms.

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righthand 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But we still don't have a solution to search projects on potentially thousands of servers, including self-hosted ones.

Why do you need a search index on your self hosted git server? Doesn’t Kagi solve that?

	▲	goku12 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Why do you need a search index on your self hosted git server The search index doesn't have to be on your server, does it? What if there is an external (perhaps distributed/replicated) index that you could submit the relevant information to? Or if an external crawler could collect it on your behalf? (some sort of verification will also be needed.) There are two reasons why such a dedicated index is useful. The first is that the general index is too full of noise. That's why people search projects directly on Github. The second problem is that the generic crawlers aren't very good at extracting relevant structured information from source projects, especially the information that the project owner wants to advertise. For example the readme, contribution guidelines, project status, installation and usage information, language(s), license(s), CoC, issue tracker location, bug and security reporting information, keywords, project type, etc. Github and sourcegraph allow you to do precise searches based on those. Try using a regular search engine to locate an obscure project that you already know about.

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kaferoni 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There is ongoing work on decentralizing discoverability and reach: https://tangled.sh/