SourceHut's homepage is almost objectively mediocre design. It does very little to cue you into the most important parts of the page and help you parse and scan it quickly.

For example, let's look at the spacing. The padding and margin in each section are inconsistent, almost random. It forces you to do mental work to separate them in your mind, and it doesn't allow you to take mental breaks, because it's hard to find your place if you look away, almost like reading a book. The header literally just runs into the body of page, like a single wall of text. And at what benefit? Slightly less scrolling? Scrolling is trivial.

Copywriting is part of design. Tell me, what purpose does this copy serve? "Welcome to sourcehut! This suite of open source tools is the software development platform you've been waiting for. We've taken the wisdom of the most successful open-source communities and turned it into a platform of efficient engineering tools." Most of this is useless and can be cut. People skim on the Internet. Give them bite-sized and useful info, not a paragraph that says welcome.

SourceHut is capitalized in three different ways: SourceHut, sourcehut, and Sourcehut. This is not really communicating to me great attention to detail or professionalism. If you think that's not important, then you probably don't understand why restaurants with clean floors and well-maintained exteriors inspire more trust in diners than dirty or dilapidated restaurants. We look at exteriors to get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

Typography is important, too. There's no main heading on the page, nothing to call your eye to, except the blog post at the top. I have to hunt to figure out where to start reading, and I'm almost guaranteed to start in the wrong place and then adjust. The headings in the main body also aren't sufficiently bold to stand out and draw your eye. Even the indentation of the testimonials is inconsistent. Why aren't they indented along with the bullet points to convey that they fall under the headings?

Where color is used, it's distracting and misleading. My eyes are drawn toward random links and testimonials rather than to important parts of the page that I should read first. (For comparison, look at how Stripe.com uses color to draw your eye to headings.)

The clickable buttons are tiny. The images are tiny, too -- far too small to be useful. They also lack captions, and clicking on them takes me to random and confusing places. Compare to the highly readable code examples on Stripe.com.

I could go on. It's not a terrible homepage. It's functional. I've seen much worse. But it has many obvious major design flaws that make it a worse experience for reading.

Developers have a norm of loving minimalistic, simplistic, text-heavy, old-school, nostalgic interfaces. That's fine. I'm partial to them, too. But it's important not to get, "I like this," confused with, "This is good design." It's not. A good rule of thumb is that if you have to be inculcated with the beliefs of a particular tribe in order to find something good, and everybody outside that tribe finds it repulsive, it's probably not good.

EDIT: I spent 10 minutes in the dev tools and made a better version: https://i.imgur.com/AoOy50x.png