Show HN: Find alternatives to almost any popular GitHub repo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185599

by stanislavb • 4 years ago

120 55 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Several months ago, I built a "stealth" feature that I could use. It hasn't been advertised, and I've been the only user. As I find it useful for myself, I believe others (software developers) may like it too. So, this is the first public post about it, and if it gets any positive feedback, I may put some time into promoting it more.

In essence, given that you've opened a GitHub repo (there are ~225k of the more popular ones indexed as of now), you can replace "github" with "libhunt" within the URL, and you will find the top alternatives and related projects.

For example, here are three popular repos:

- https://github.com/rails/rails

- https://github.com/vercel/next.js

- https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre

To test it out, open any of the examples above and replace "github" with "libhunt" within the browser URL. You can also try with any other repository as long as it's a bit popular.

I'd be more than happy to answer any questions and receive some feedback. Thanks!

bot41• 4 years ago

Nice one. The rails comparison is missing the JS version of Rails: RedwoodJS.

How do you find the matches/similar repos?

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Thanks! I track all repos mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News and Dev.to (almost in real-time). Then, the ones that are commonly mentioned are considered alternatives/similar. I also use some signals from LibHunt itself - what people are comparing and manually suggesting as alternatives.

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

For example, my example above is spoiling this logic a bit :D. I've mentioned three projects that are neither alternatives nor similar ones. However, their mentions have been tracked and used as a signal. Yes, it's imperfect, but it works "good enough" in most cases.

jspann2• 4 years ago

Works for me! Cool project!

I really like the "Comparisons" page with brief info about the repos.

Does it crawl all of GitHub to find repos with similar names or only stick to the popular repos that were already indexed? Also how does it rank the alternatives that it finds? For example on https://www.libhunt.com/bitcoin/bitcoin , why is umbrel above dogecoin or bitcoin book?

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Thanks, mate! It crawls only projects mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News and Dev.to.

ronyfadel• 4 years ago

Crawling noob here: what's a good strategy to crawl these websites? Reddit is huge, how does one efficiently crawl it? Search API for Github links?

jspann2• 4 years ago

I see. Nice work!

markdown• 4 years ago

The top alternatives for next.js were rails and tailwindcss.

Tailwind is css, and is no replacement for next.js OR rails.

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Yeah, I know. That's a good example that the list includes both Alternatives and Similar projects. It's definitely imperfect in that direction as of now. That's something I'd like to improve in the future. I guess incorporating some on page user feedback like "Is it an alternative - Yes / No" could do the job...

nyanpasu642• 4 years ago

The automated suggestion finding alternative seems poorly done and stuffed with ads:

- https://www.libhunt.com/posts/564420-lifetimes-clones-and-cl... (what's a post?)

- https://www.libhunt.com/r/owning-ref-rs (Tokio is unrelated to owning-ref, fluent.js isn't even the same language, and Scout APM is a stealth ad, not an alternative, and "fortify" wasn't even mentioned).

- https://www.libhunt.com/libretro/RetroArch (351ELEC doesn't run on the same hardware as RetroArch, aliaspider/pcsx2 is an outdated fork of the actual PCSX2, and SonarQube is a stealth ad).

In fact for the first two URLs, I think I found libhunt.com in Google search results, and they were entirely useless. To me it's worthless SEO spam like Pinterest.

abathur3• 4 years ago

I don't like to fling poo at anything people are putting their heart into, but... I've been wondering who to be annoyed at about this.

libhunt (along with joyk, giters, pythonissues, libreddit, teddit, opensourceagenda, githubmemory, maybe some I'm forgetting?), is on the list of content-repackagey sites regularly eating up slots in the top 2 pages of search results for the exact name of my wee attention-starved project on ALL of google, ddg, and bing (it even eats 2 of the 5 paltry entries bing bothers to show on the first page of results!)

And, of course, none of the comparisons are relevant.

Constructively: it would be great if the developer would, at minimum, figure out where the roll-off point for not-popular-enough-to-get-decent-results is, and discourage search engines from indexing pages under the threshold.

omnicognate• 4 years ago

I've been wondering who to be annoyed at about this.

I suggest being annoyed at Google.

nyanpasu642• 4 years ago

Minor note: libreddit and teddit are supposedly privacy-protecting low-JS Reddit frontends, rather than commercial site scrapers. I'm not sure if they live up to their reputation though.

ianthehenry• 4 years ago

I use uBlacklist to remove sites like this from search results. It's pretty great. All the GitHub mirrors, the StackOverflow scrapers, any site that requires an account to view the thing I searched for... one click to never see these ad factories again.

ReleaseCandidat2• 4 years ago

(what's a post?)

From the Libhunt site:

   It monitors everything that's posted on Reddit, HackerNews & Dev.to (almost
   in real-time). Then, if an open-source repository gets mentioned, we record
   that and use it to compile the lists of popular and similar projects.

I have some problems believing that the author thought that this really helps actually finding alternatives.

encryptluks2• 4 years ago

I've always seen Libhunt as a spammy SEO site. I've seen it in search results before and everytime it was useless. Their comparisons were clearly unoriginal based on some unknown algorithm trying to scrape data.

toastal• 4 years ago

Will give recommendations from other Git forges too?

Crazyontap• 4 years ago

Cool project. In a related note, sometime back I used to use cdnjs a lot to find the best js libraries and related projects too.

So let's say you're looking for the best carousel library, just type carousel in their search and it will show you all the popular carousel libraries sorted by github stars.

etewiah• 4 years ago

This is awesome! Awesome enough that I actually don't mind that it has ads. I checked out my project (https://www.libhunt.com/etewiah/property_web_builder ) and even though the alternatives were not bang-on, there is a button to suggest alternatives so the results can be improved.

What I really like though are the mentions. I'll keep coming back to that page if only to keep an eye on where my project is getting mentioned.

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Hah, the engine that tracks mentions was a separate product. It was built to track brand mentions on social networks. i.e. the reason you'd be coming back to this page. However, as I couldn't market it, I repurposed the whole project to be used as a back-end engine only.

culi3• 4 years ago

Hey I've actually come across this tool before, so you must've gotten something right with the SEO. Also wanted to plug AlternativeTo[0] which I'm constantly shocked by how little known it can be even amongst people who work in tech.

[0] https://alternativeto.net/

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Thanks! Another product that I've built, SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com, is an alternative to alternativeto.net :D

culi3• 4 years ago

Hey this looks great! This next sentence is gonna be a mouthful, but the alternatives to SaaSHub listed on SaaSHub seem much better than the alternatives to alternativeto listed on alternativeto. Interestingly, SaasHub doesn't show up as one of the top alternatives to alternativeto on alternativeto

danuker• 4 years ago

Thank you!

This looks nice. The one I've been using so far seems to glitch sometimes:

http://www.yasiv.com/github/

iFire• 4 years ago

Any idea why it says https://www.libhunt.com/godotengine/godot is GPL3 and not MIT license?

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Outdated data... also, the license seems to have been modified recently.

sjml• 4 years ago

Been MIT at least since their 1.0 release 7+ years ago... https://github.com/godotengine/godot/tree/1.0-stable

Doctor_Fegg• 4 years ago

There seems to be something wrong with the licence parsing: https://www.libhunt.com/r/tilemaker also wrongly claims GPL 3.

svnpenn• 4 years ago

I suggested an alternate to something, and it said it was approved. However I dont see the suggestion if I refresh the page. So are the suggestions just meaningless, or whats the deal?

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

Only the top 21 alternatives/relevant repos are listed. If your suggestion didn't cross the "threshold", that's the reason it wasn't listed immediately. In most cases, if another user suggests it, it may pop up.

Also, this is a known "issue"/confusion! I will add a section with the most recent suggestions. That should regard this case. At least for the time being.

p.s. thanks for trying LibHunt and your feedback.

madeofpalk• 4 years ago

Results for your examples don't seem too great to be honest. https://www.libhunt.com/vercel/next.js gives:

- React (Next.js is a framework on top of react)

- Tailwind (is a CSS framework, not a website framework)

- [a sponsored result that is not an alternative]

- Gatsby - An alternative!

- Typescript (is a language)

- Express - (is a server, stretch to call it an alternative)

- Nuxt.js - an alternative!!

jacobmischka2• 4 years ago

Agreed. I actually spent about an hour on Tuesday looking for alternatives to outdated JS libraries, and every one of these "alternatives" sites listed mostly tangentially related libraries and very few actual alternatives. I imagine they're mostly generated by user behavior somehow, but something could use tweaking for sure.

addandsubtract• 4 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it here, but I'm a fan of npmtrends[0]. You can search for npm libraries that you know, and it will recommend related searches for you. Then it'll compare them based on downloads over time and show their github activity at the bottom. I use this every time I need to find a new library.

[0] https://www.npmtrends.com/

syntaxfree• 4 years ago

I tried a couple of projects that are way too small to get alternatives listed. I got 404s, I expected a page with the libhunt design with some basic metadata and a vague assertion that they will be checked out.

Also: you should be logging those misses.

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

That's a good call. I will definitely implement it. Thanks!

junon• 4 years ago

Your URL thing doesn't accept https://GitHub.com but does accept https://github.com. They are the same URI, though.

ayewo• 4 years ago

With respect to your demo using 3 popular repos, it would have been nicer if you put the corresponding libhunt link next to each GitHub link, especially for those of us on mobile.

showbufire• 4 years ago

this is really cool

mro_name2• 4 years ago

Wonderful! Have you considered a machine readable DOAP access?

mro_name2• 4 years ago

would be cool if the german non-profit forge https://codeberg.org were allowed.

Edit: And Drew DeVault's https://git.sr.ht/

Edit 2: And this gitlab project https://www.libhunt.com/r/geohash has github icons all over the place.

yakshaving_jgt• 4 years ago

I didn’t find any alternatives, but I did find that my library has brought joy to the world.

https://www.libhunt.com/jezen/is-thirteen

spookyuser• 4 years ago

This is really cool, just found something I'm going to use in a project because of this!

michidk• 4 years ago

Not very accurate https://www.libhunt.com/funtoo/keychain

stanislavb12• 4 years ago

You could also contribute and suggest some better options...

incognos• 4 years ago

why be part of the solution? This is great work, much nicer than the so many predatory sites that claim to list alternatives only to pump up some trek they built and try to charge for....

Keep up the good work!!

thatguyagain• 4 years ago

Cool idea for sure, but as others have pointed out, it's not great yet. How would this work though? Wouldn't you need to have some meta data about the base lib, like for example "web framework", so that you can search for other libs using the same language (if that's even relevant) that also has been tagged as "web framework"? Seems tricky to me, but I don't know.

vaughan• 4 years ago

The key is manual curation. Once you need to find a library, you do a bit of Googling/Reditting, and after 30mins you have the full low down on what are the actual alternatives and the differences. All the automated library tools don’t work.

teodorlu• 4 years ago

Agreed - this is a subjective value judgment, hard / impossible to automate. As a list of links to check out, sure. As an automated conclusion? No thanks.

Someone is going to have to make a judgment call. If curation isn't built into the service, the user must spend more effort.

Show HN: Find alternatives to almost any popular GitHub repo

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