I've developed a set of UNIX-philosophy CLI utilities for managing your zettelkasten, a C++ library (used by the utilities) and a set of shell scripts that makes the whole thing easy to use for the terminal-savvy. The fzf-based finder (script) integrates with Vim. It's probably the fastest set of zettelkasten utilities. Heavily inspired by sirupsen/zk, but faster, more powerful and more consistent interface.
I decided on the FOSS option even before GitHub sold out to Microsoft. I've used Gitlab (and Gitlab CI) on my home server for years, it's been excellent so far.
How so? `git clone` doesn't operate any differently here than it does on GitHub or any other git hosting service. Reading the `README.md` or other Markdown based project notes doesn't work any differently here from GitHub or any other git host. Reading a documentation wiki, or filing an issue in the bug tracker isn't any different here. Hell, you can even log in using your GitHub account on most other git hosting services, so creating an account there is pretty much totally "frictionless". So, what exactly is so "painful" about it?
Github is fundamentally flawed.
It's wrong to host nearly all prominent FOSS on a proprietary platform that also does whatever the hell it wants with your code, regardless of the license of your project (CoPilot), because apparently they feel the github ToS outranks than your chosen license.
utilities + lib: https://gitlab.com/andrejr/zetk shell wrappers: https://gitlab.com/andrejr/zetk_fzf
Shared under AGPL3.