> Infrastructure should be neutral.

Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation.

The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself.

I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait.

And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms.

And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.

Can you suggest a viable infrastructure alternative?

My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU.

Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.

Codeberg is one public flagship instance. They are not neutral and don't claim to be. Decisions on what to host are made via elections by e.V. members. Other platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Tangled etc.) will eventually run into this same thing as well, e.g. how GitHub responds to DMCA requests, the difference with Codeberg is that there are elections which decide on what gets hosted on the main instance. For hosting slop or running a ton of actions, the recommendation is to self-host Forgejo directly instead, meaning that you, not the e.V. pays for the consequences, and you'd use the future AP federation support for cross-instance support. Forgejo is particularly simple to self-host as well, and lots of people do it (ffmpeg, Fedora and more). That way, you get to set your own rules and e.V. election results have no effect on you.

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Sounds more like a cult rather than a social club.

I don't know BitBucket, but GitLab is felt extremely bloated and slow - Codeberg is much leaner and faster

Azure was arguably as garbage four years ago as it is today, the only thing that's changed in the past few years is MS mandated vibe coding, and suddenly Github has an outage every week? A ridiculous coincidence if it's not causal.