Cannot agree more on this.

There are two sides to github consumption - active and passive.

On passive side - we are happy to stick to basics of git on CLI / IDE and get the job done of a version control. And the site is usually to configure CI/CD and so on.

However on active consumption of open source - it is all about discovery of repos relevant to tech you are into and people behind them. It is so amazing to go and find a good committer profile and see what repos he follows.

And the new github trending is simply axing their own feet here.

Your clash with the conventional usage and connotation of these terms was probably intended, but how is browsing repos active consumption (and vice versa)? Isn't creating and collaborating on projects much more active than just looking at interesting stuff?

In grad school I used GitHub as

1. A git-aware Google Drive, where I could stick version-controlled code I wanted to sync between computers and possibly share with colleagues (and also create a paper trail if someone beats me to the bunch publishing something, ha)

2. As a CDN serving open-source projects I depended on, but discovered almost exclusively by other means

None of my GitHub-hosted code ever had a README.md, I never starred anything, and I often never even visited the repos I depended on (their documentation would be hosted elsewhere and copying-and-pasting the GH URL from there was all I needed to do to depend on it). If I visited an Issues page, it was because I got there through googling an error message, not because I went there through GH's UI.

This Drive / CDN usage pattern is sort of the baseline, "passive" level of engagement with GH imo.

Ah ok, thanks!

If I'm being honest (and maybe others who are saying they don't care about the "fun" side of GH would agree), I have a knee-jerk slightly negative reaction to this side of Github. And it's because I don't really spend my free time contributing to open source projects. When I was younger I worked on more personal projects, and I coded in my free time just to learn new technologies, but I do this less and less now and am quite happy with that. Probably 90%+ of the code I've written in the past 10 years (some of it quite clever and solving some quite interesting problems, if I do say myself) has been for employers. I don't think that makes me a worse future employee than someone who contributes more to open source, and I feel very fulfilled spending my nights and weekends doing other non-programming things.

I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.

Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.

This is how I have "fun" with it as well. O wouldn't even consider myself a developer but thanks to my interest in Docker, GitHub has been a source of fun and now I maintain an automated build that integrates both platforms and now has 100k downloads.

I do this too. It's a great way to find projects I'm interested in