That's a fair concern. There are two paths I think we'll offer to address the issue.

First, the code you're running is just totally standard Node.js, and we've got easy tools for taking what you make and running it anywhere else, if you want.

Second, we'll be building more reasons that you'd want to stay in the Gomix community — features that give you benefit from being in a network. In some ways it's similar to Stack Overflow, in that everybody owns what they contribute, but having a place to do so benefits everyone.

Just FYI while it is definitely centralized, and you are correctly tensing up at the sight of that, here are the "Advanced" options you get when managing a project: http://i.imgur.com/ohDUnKI.png

You can import any code from a Github repository you have, or export the project you're working on to a Github repository, or download a .tgz of the entire thing. Anil's opinions on "the web we lost"[0] fit into the ethos of Fog Creek and co well, I think.

[0] http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html

I think its a great idea by still cant get past the new latest name for it. HyperDev was geared toward the technical crowd, But GoMix??? It speaks to no one...

The name reminded me of a derogatory term for patients. Or a Go library called "mix". Those reservations aside, it does seem descriptive of what the service actually does. Still, it lacks the charm of "StackOverflow," or the uniqueness of "Trello."

I don't see how centralization is a big concern in this case. One of the fundamental features is that you can take the code anytime and hoist it up anywhere you please.

If anything centralization in this case just greases the skids to running quickly without any lock-in.

What's wrong with being centralized? It's just a prototyping platform. I doubt anyone would build a production app on this.

I recently used it to play with websockets and being centralized was the main reason it worked so well.

Exactly this. It's like saying shadertoy is bad because it's centralized. When in reality it doesn't matter because everyone is going to lift their code out to their production env when they're done experimenting.

In software, unfortunately, the prototype often is the production app.

I was hoping it would be for production apps...

I think the OP's concerns with centralization is that over time this might become a great collection of fun/useful/interesting/<insert adjective here> sites, just like geocities, but because it is centralized it can all irrevocably just go away one day at the whim of the controlling company. Just like geocities.

This comment made me laugh a lot.

So I made this:

http://i.imgur.com/OJ3ZgDD.jpg