I am currently working on a few projects including libraries. Of course most people publish to crates.io, however that unfortunately requires a GitHub account. I do not have or want to create a GitHub account for several reasons.

Instead I plan on using a cargo registry on my Forgejo instance since that is already where I publish code. What is the best way to communicate the process of adding the registry to users? I want to make this as frictionless as possible for both users of the libraries and users of any libraries built on top of mine.

Cargo issue?

The issue seems to be mostly with cargo—while it does support alternative registries it treats them as 'second-class'—there's no command to add registries one comparable to something like Ubuntu ppas, instead requiring users to manually add the registry in a configuration file.

Sure, this simplifies things for crates.io users but creates an issue for those who want to publish elsewhere. I would like to see such a command added along with a shorthand way to specify the registry for a crate, something like cargo add myregistry/mycrate.

crates.io issue?

While I am not a fan of centralization, that is not the main issue I have with crates.io—I wouldn't mind using it if there was a way to log in with and use repositories from something other than GitHub. This requirement compounds the centralization issue.

Community issue?

Generally there seems to be a heavy reliance on GitHub by the Rust community. RFCs and patches have to be submitted through GitHub. Given its dominance and the difficulty in migrating I understand this, however I don't see why this dependence should be effectively forced on the broader community of crate developers.

There are a lot of reasons people such as myself refuse to use GitHub:

• It is owned by Microsoft
• It requires the user to agree to anti-user legal terms
• The frontend is non-free and bloated
• It collects a large amount of data and trains proprietary LLMs on users' code
• It currently holds a near-monopoly on Git forges

I could name plenty of other reasons but I don't want to sound too much like RMS. In my opinion the expectation that Rust developers all have and use accounts on such a site goes against the principles of a free, open and inclusive environment/community. Change toward first-class support of other forges or registries would be very welcome!

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