If your IP (and possible your browser) looks “suspicious” or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.
Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
Discourse, Git* and more really need federated search.
It is already hard getting Contributors for projects, even more if you are on some random selfhosted server that nobody finds and everyone needs to create a new account for.
Good idea
https://forgefed.org/
Cool!