(Last Modified: 06/03/2024)
As you may already know, Git is a popular decentralized version control system (VCS) used by GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg, and other Git forges. You probably use one or more of these Git forges yourself. All fine, no problems there. In fact, I highly recommend using these platforms if you're trying to gain recognition and collaborate with others on projects. I'm not a fan of centralized services as much as the next guy, but creating a separate account on different, possibly outdated, Gitea or Forgejo instances is really unintuitive and will prevent people from collaborating with you (not to mention the potential security issues). There are protocols such as ForgeFed being actively developed as of this writing, which allow submitting pull requests, issues, continuous integration (CI), without being held hostage to a centralized service. This looks promising!
There is already a way to collaborate with each other using email (the way Git was intended to be used). To the best of my knowledge however, there are relatively few people who seem to prefer this style of workflow over the more "modern way". I'm personally not opposed to it, but I can understand why detractors aren't a fan of it (lack of automatic CI, for example).
This article makes it sound like I'm completely opposed to self-hosting your own Git server. I'm not. I just don't find it appropriate for collaborating with as many people as possible yet. I still think you should at least keep a mirror on your own personal website regardless. Think of what happened to Lasse Collin when the XZ backdoor was announced. GitHub took the XZ repository down and suspended his account. Fortunately, he didn't get permanently banned and his account was reinstated, but my point is that your repositories are ultimately at the mercy of whoever hosts them for you. You may not be so lucky, and your entire portfolio may get thrown in the trash can if you didn't regularly backup your Git repositories. Another advantage to self-hosting is the fact that your Git repositories (or at least your private ones) won't be fed for AI training. Your public repositories probably won't be either if it's a relatively niche project.
Regardless of whether or not you decide to self-host, please maintain regular backups on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. Your data may get corrupted, you may forget to pay rent for the server, or your server provider may kick you off their platform. Always keep backups!