This reads like something Bo Burnham would write/perform.

I remember coming across HoMM around 2008, but the published game was nowhere available near where I lived, so I ended up playing a web based clone[0].

Been playing it for around 17 years, and it is still quite fun.

[0] https://www.lordswm.com/

Just from a first impression, it seems like credits replace subscription here?

The only difference then is to switch to a pay as you go rather than fixed monthly payments.

Correct, but the credits can be spent on any apps in our network and there's no expiration on it.

3121 pts, 14 avg. years off.

Decent try considering most of the options were USA specific.

I recently came across TypescriptToLua[0] which has improved my experience of writing Lua manyfolds. No more having to deal with 1-based indexes or lack of type hints.

[0] - https://typescripttolua.github.io/

Coincidentally, I've been mulling the same idea for a week now. A self-hostable source forge + registry to serve artifacts would be amazing.

I think the only thing you'd lose is the 'social' aspects of GitHub, but I believe that can be made up with a combination of rss feeds (?), ActivityPub etc.

I think we've been thinking similarly. Decentralization will have it's costs. I've been thinking Opt-In centralized search for personal repos, maybe as a gitea (or other self hosted options) plug-in. But as you suggest, maybe existing features can be leveraged to prove the social/discoverability.