Lots of major free software projects are hosted by the project creators to avoid being screwed over by proprietary services.
Examples
If Microsoft were to release a competing link aggregator; then they could persuade GitHub (Microsoft’s subsidiary) into locking or removing the main repository for Lemmy’s source code.
deleted by creator
It also has many nice features like pages etc.
or a self-hosted gitea instance maybe ?
We already have both of those, self hosted gitea and codeberg.
That’s an extra cost though
I agree! There is also forge friends.