I don't understand why GitLab (as in gitlab.com) doesn't focus more on the discovery part in order to make people feel more welcome.
I was using github.com/explore almost daily while it lasted. The trending repositories by language were an amazing tool to discover new tools and ideas.
I really wish GitLab had something equivalent to this!
In our 15.10 release (March 22), we added a new section called Explore that helps with content discovery and includes a tab for Trending projects that can be filtered by language. You can read out it in the release notes [0] or just go check it out [1].
Gitlab is a bit weird in that regard. Their standalone self-hosted use of it is great, but overall discovery is extremely poor on both self hosted and cloud editions.
They seem to have based the whole thing on the way Bitbucket works and completely ignored that being able to find a repo you've not been directly added to would be slightly useful.
If someone from gitlab is reading this and thinking "But you can find things" - you're blinded by the issue being an internal user. There might be ways of doing it, but its a convoluted mess and doesn't come close to github in that regard.
I would probably agree that GitHub is better for discovery than GitLab, but the OP's comment is funny to me, because having worked extensively with both, I'm a much bigger fan of GitLab's UI and UX for builders. Groups and nesting are massive when it comes to being able to work with teams, and the fact that you can set options across groups at any level eliminates whole classes of things that are frustrating problems on github, or anything else that uses flat hierarchies.
I wrote a (public) uBlock filter list to hide this social media-like stuff. The “you might also like” genre exists to keep you on the platform and I have enough distractions.
I think gitlab just gave up on trying to compete with github.
They don't care about anything other than enterprise use cases, which are mostly on private instances.
I was using github.com/explore almost daily while it lasted. The trending repositories by language were an amazing tool to discover new tools and ideas.
I really wish GitLab had something equivalent to this!