Earlier quoted context omitted.
This also affects self hosted instances in a company where you want to find other packages though. It's not a "social network" feature.
You're telling me there are cases where a company has so many projects in it's gitlab instance that employees routinely have to search for things? That seems odd to me. I'd expect there to be a naming scheme for most things, and even if there's some oddball project, I'd think somebody else you work with knows about it and where it is. My company has maybe 20-30 projects, and I can find any of them easily if I know th…
I work for a university that has a centralized IT, but each of the schools may also have an IT group. When they setup a local Gitlab instance I moved our team's (web development) projects over.
We have over 60 projects alone within our group (our own school was decentralized, and only in the last 5 or so years have I been able to get things centralized within our team), and there's a ton that the centralized IT group has on the instance, plus all of those that other schools share. We currently have three people in our team (two designers/front-end, one full stack), but at one point were at six plus a consultant.
I've got a good idea of what most of the 60+ repos contain, and where things are, but a good search for the various open repos, and those that I'm semi-associated with, would be fantastic.