How do you actually discover or promote new open source projects?

We've been building GitGem.org, and the whole thing started from one frustration: finding good open source is weirdly hard, and getting your own project seen is even harder.

GitHub Trending shows you the same giant repos over and over. The genuinely interesting new projects, the ones at 80 stars that should be at 8,000, get buried before anyone notices them. So we built GitGem to rank by star velocity instead of raw totals, pulling from GitHub, GitLab, and Codeberg, with curated gems and a showcase where makers can submit their own work.

We're curious how everyone here actually handles both sides:

• If you're looking: where do you find new projects worth trying? Trending pages, newsletters, Twitter/X, word of mouth?

• If you're building: how do you get your project in front of people without just shouting into the void?

• What makes you decide a repo is worth your time? Stars, recent activity, the README, something else?

Launching GitGem on Product Hunt tomorrow, and we'd rather build it around how people really discover and share projects than our own assumptions. Would love your take.