That's what I'm not so sure about though. Forgejo/codeberg/... projects are already not hard to find through search engines. Add a federated in-forgejo search and you'd be set there.

And currently the problem indeed is that a forgejo project is on instance X, and you, as a developer only have accounts on Y and Z. But through federation, that would stop mattering, so I don't get the "it's where contributors are": as long as contributors have a single forgejo account anywhere, we'd be good.