> 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/
[2] https://sourceforge.net/