Open Source projects used to all be hosted on hundreds of random mirrors. The hosting of which was free and donated, because it was just an HTTP/FTP/RSYNC directory on a file server in a closet in some corporation or university. Didn't even need to be reliable, as there were hundreds of mirrors. Linux distributions, and some very old projects, are still maintained this way.

Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.

Maybe it's impossible to go back to a simpler time. But it's not impossible to change the state of things today.

This is the difference between open source to share useful code and open source to build leverage for a business.

> Nowadays you must have a flashy website. You must host everything on a single managed VCS provider, or a programming package ecosystem hoster. You must depend on corporations to give you free things, in exchange for you giving them everything about you (otherwise you must pay out of pocket for everything). You must do what everyone else does.

You keep saying _must_. Why _must_ you do what everyone else does? To what end? To get contributors to your project? To get funding? No one is stopping anyone from starting a project on sourceforge.