> There are so many generous individuals or organisations who host open source services for free on their infrastructure. I'm thinking of federated networks

> There are so many generous individuals or organisations who host open source services for free on their infrastructure. I'm thinking of federated networks like Matrix or Mastodon or utilities like Jitsi, Cyberchef or SSLPing. Useful things if you know where to find them. I like this question because it asks about a genuine need where a "hole" exists. Foremost the FSF maintains a directory [1] Of course there have been, and are, many means by which you can find of amazing free open source software on the web. Back in the Slashdot days "Freshmeat" and "Sourceforge" [2] were the go-to places, but were eventually strewn with the weeds of advertising and low quality submissions unfiltered for malware. Web indexes remain but YMMV wrt quality, and many can be considered link-farms. In some sense "distros", and those people working to curate collections are doing that work. But discovery is still unsolved in many ways. A big threat (in my personal opinion) is the gravity of GitHub (part of the Microsoft estate) pulling in so many small developers and creating an over-reliance on patronage hostile to the free software charter. It would be interesting to ponder what more modern social networks could offer, particularly from the revenue/funding POV for paying for quality curating and review, [1] http://directory.fsf.org/ http://directory.fsf.org/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/ https://sourceforge.net/