works well and you can self host it you should try it!
Gitlab/Bitbucket are not "dumps" for projects you deem useless, and "useless" projects are not useless at all from an educational point of view. Gitlab and Bitbucket are exactly the same as Github and should have both "serious" and "useless" projects the same.
Using a personal Gitlab instance or anything similar for that is a terrible idea because it costs substantial time and money of individual developers and severely hurts discoverability.
People should put their "useless" projects wherever they want and are permitted to.
Not everyone wants to have to share everything that is useless with the world especially if it's only going to be you.
I also don't want people to have to bug me for feature requests as well on top of that.
There is a reason GitHub/Lab/Bitbucket has private repos for this purpose.
You can obviously choose to share it, but you shouldn't be whining if your 'useless' hobby repository suddenly becomes the focus of attention of developers requesting more features.
I never said you wanted anything. I'm the one who wants to have 'discoverability', both for my projects and other projects that might interest me. It's you, for some unknown reason, that don't want me or anyone to have it!
> Not everyone wants to have to share everything that is useless with the world especially if it's only going to be you.
Then don't. But don't demand that of others.
> I also don't want people to have to bug me for feature requests as well on top of that.
That's perfectly acceptable, and I never implied it wasn't.
> you shouldn't be whining if your 'useless' hobby repository suddenly becomes the focus of attention of developers requesting more features
That seems to be your problem, and you're the only one in this discussion complaining about it. Looks like you're projecting your issues onto me.
I use Github all the time to find code samples, especially for 3D stuff, shaders, audio, emulation, demoscene... It's more common to find solutions to my problems in zero-star projects than in big ones.
Lots of people star my code-as-art experiments too, and from the forks I can see they find educational value in it.
Not everything in the world has to fit perfectly into some preconceived mold. Heck, in that case, the most interesting/educational things are trying to avoid that.