The Old Way of Publishing MCP Servers Is Gone. Here's What Replaced It.

I Assumed It Would Be Easy

I've been building MCP servers for a while now. Filesystem tools, search utilities, API wrappers — the pattern is familiar: write the server, test it locally, document it, call it done. The last step — making it discoverable — always felt secondary.

Back when the MCP Registry was a GitHub repo, "publishing" meant opening a PR and waiting. Sometimes days, sometimes weeks. It worked, but it was slow.

Then I heard the registry had moved. The new system lives at registry.modelcontextprotocol.io — a proper API-based registry with a CLI tool, OAuth authentication, and namespace verification. No more PR queues. No more JSON files in someone else's repo.

I was excited. Then I tried it.