what other platform can be used that's free and doesn't require self hosting for making our projects public?

Gitlab, codeberg, and many more are good alternatives to GitHub, but I would suggest having a read only mirror on GitHub to make the project more discoverable

Gitlab, codeberg, and many more are good alternatives to GitHub, but I would suggest having a read only mirror on GitHub to make the project more discoverable

I do think that github is the best place, at least currently, accessibility is important, for most people github is the most accessible, many don't even have an account on gitlab and other platforms (Thus they won't even bother reporting issues) and the UI is bad & confusing (actually gitlab recently changed their UI to more closely match github).

The read-only approach is a good alternative but the main problem is people not reporting issues, so this is a case of the going for the greater good.