> I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is

And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything.

"The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit.

I myself workaround this by dropping the whole idea that I'm writing software for others, and I only write it for myself, so if people want it, go to my personal Gitea instance and grab it if you want, I couldn't care less about stars and "publicity" or whatever people nowadays care about. But I'm also lucky enough to already have a network, it might require other's to build their network on GitHub first, then also be able to do something similar, and it'll all work out in the end.

> that's where the community is

The part of the FOSS community that embraces proprietary dependencies are there, but there’s a lot of the community outside of it.

Fortunately, GitHub is pushing hard for folks to want to move away.

In particular a number of other projects assume that you have a GitHub account. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 has been open for literally a decade without any meaningful work. If you want to publish a Lean software packages on Reservoir, the official Lean package registry, their requirements (https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria) not only specify a GitHub project specifically, but having at least two stars on GitHub as a "basic quality filter". Microsoft is a big funder of Lean and I can't help but think this is a deliberate restriction to increase lock-in on a Microsoft-owned platform.

GitHub also generously gives me a bunch of free CI, in exchange for whatever they benefit from me being there.

It's worth $50 just this month, according to them, but I don't see anyone else offering the mac runners that account for most of it.

For all the complaints, I test my packages that actually need it across dozens of architecture and OS combinations with a mix of runners, nested virtualization and qemu binfmt, all on their free platform.

I have been struggling with this, myself. I used to push everything to GitHub, but a couple months ago I switched over to using my small low-power home server as a Git host. I used to really enjoy the feeling of pushing commits up to GitHub, and that little dopamine rush hasn't really transferred to my home machine yet.

It's a shame. The people who control the money successfully committed enshittification against open source.

Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better.

Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.