I just went through the process of publishing my MCP server (slimcontext-mcp-server) to the new official MCP Registry and wanted to share my experience with the dev community.
The Process
The mcp-publisher CLI is straightforward once you get it working, but the experience felt rough around the edges. I had to retry publishing multiple times due to preview instability, and the whole thing felt like early-stage software (which, to be fair, it is).
The Big Question
With all the private MCP catalogs that have emerged recently - Docker's MCP Catalog, various marketplaces, and other registries - I'm genuinely wondering if the official registry provides enough value right now.
The private registries seem more mature, offer better discovery features, and have tighter integration with popular MCP clients. They're already battle-tested and working smoothly.
What I'm Curious About
For those who have published to both official and private registries:
- Are you seeing more adoption from the official registry?
- Is the "official" stamp actually driving more usage?
- Worth the extra effort, or better to focus on private catalogs for now?
I wrote up the complete publishing walkthrough with all the technical details, but I'm more interested in hearing about real-world experiences.
What's your take? Are you prioritizing the official registry or sticking with the private options that seem more polished right now?
Top comments (1)
The preview instability is the bit that matches my experience too. I ended up queuing retries with exponential backoff in the publish script because the /v0/publish endpoint would 502 on the first two attempts and then succeed on the third, every time. Felt less like registry design and more like whatever is in front of it auto-scaling cold.
On the "is it worth it" question: for me the official registry's main value is not its discovery UI but the fact that it is a neutral place downstream aggregators can pull from. Smithery, Docker's catalog, and the ad-hoc lists on GitHub all scrape different sources, so publishing to the official registry is basically a way to get your server into everyone's ingestion pipeline at once. Did you feel the same, or do you think the aggregators are still too bad at picking things up?