The beauty of this site is that it's just HTML with minimal styling and JavaScript. If the current walled garden doesn't fit my needs at some point in the future, throwing it on another host takes less than 10 minutes, plus whatever the delay will be from DNS propagation. That's a built-in future resiliency, IMO.
I think it right to base the assessment of whether it is a walled garden on how easy it is for outsiders to access, and how easy it is to leave and take your community.
For viewing, I think you are doing well - your own domain name, which you can host where you like, and which currently doesn't impose many restrictions on who can view without signing up to anything.
But part of your community engagement is about having the community submit changes to you. And having that via GitHub is a walled garden - you can't make a PR without a GitHub account - or even search the code. And they say you are only allowed one free account - so one identity only - and I've heard credible reports they actively enforce it by IP matching etc..., and ban people if they suspect them of having two accounts.
Moving off GitHub isn't always that easy - you'd need to retrieve all your PRs, but then the problem is people who have GitHub accounts to engage with you would need to migrate their method of engagement.
So GitHub is absolutely a walled garden, and if you have a public GitHub, it is part of how you engage with your community.
Walled gardens do have the benefit of more people being in them - there is some barrier to entry to signing up on a random Gitea or Forgejo instance - but then you are beholden to the policies of the walled garden.
Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.
i do miss these sites. A bit nostalgic to them times where visiting a site had the information you are looking for and only the information you're looking for
