This is awesome! I've been working on something similar with Koji [0], with the added twist of taking templates for full stack (web) apps and cloning remote dev environments + production deployment pipelines alongside the code. It's been especially valuable for more junior devs/people just getting started to be able to "play" and remix an app instead of trying to start building from scratch. Especially when some of them have never even heard the word "repository" before.
There's a lot of interesting stuff that comes when thinking about these kinds of templates from the level of fully-baked products instead of just lower-level components like frameworks and libraries. Excited to see where Github is headed with all of these recent feature releases.
Here is some constructive feedback. A few things that I wanted to see when I looked at the website: a "how it works" page with technical information; an explanation of how multi-environment templates with deployment pipelines work; ability to view the template source before I deploy. From 60 seconds browsing the site (which is about how long someone will spend before closing the tab and moving on) I can't tell exactly what the project does (what is the local dev environment like? How does deployment work? Is it self hosted? Does it support cloud deployments?), and looking at the details page for a template doesn't let me preview the source or see what the components are. For example, the microblogging template; what language is it written in? What does it use for a server? Does it use frameworks for the client and back-end? Does it use a database? I have literally no idea what will happen if I click on the "Use Template" button, and I'm unlikely to create an account just to find out.
I really appreciate your taking a look and writing all of that up. We're only a month or so into public beta, so a lot of things (mainly on that technical documentation side that you mentioned) are still missing. We've been heavily focused on enabling non-technical people, or very early beginners, to use the platform as creators, so we've been a little hesitant to overwhelm them with technical things that might scare them off or make it seem like this isn't a tool for them. That being said, you're absolutely right that it's a huge piece of this (and arguably the most important piece for a certain audience) and part of a balance we need to find moving forward. If you're curious about the answers to those questions, there's a low-level technical writeup on this page [0] that I'm working on incorporating somewhere into the actual product/landing page.
There's a lot of interesting stuff that comes when thinking about these kinds of templates from the level of fully-baked products instead of just lower-level components like frameworks and libraries. Excited to see where Github is headed with all of these recent feature releases.
[0] - https://gokoji.com