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The MCP Registry

blog.modelcontextprotocol.io

19 pointsaratahikaru511 comments

MCP distribution is still a huge pain, so any initiative to improve it is positive... but I am not really sure what pain this is solving and if it's going to get any traction.

I think the main MCP clients (think Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS code, Mistral Le chat...) will end up owning the distribution. The same way you have now 10-20 connectors pre-built there today, MCP connector stores are emerging. I don't see why Anthropic, OpenAI and others rely on a third party registry, they will have their own process for MCP registration which need to include validation, security checks... the same way Apple and Android own the registration of applications in their store.

Most independent registries will likely disappear if they don't add strong value on top like auth, pre vetted MCP, orchestration, RBAC...

This is already Anthropic's attempt tho, they might be going the way of being the creators of the open registry.

I hear that multiple MCP tools eat up your context. See last video Indy Dev Dan.

Maybe one day this becomes now relevant, but today? Isn’t it better to stick to CLI tools? Lesser chance of supply chain attack if you stick to the vendor’s cli.

(I use 2 MCP servers in daily life, hesitant to add more)

I think of it in terms of the individual tools, rather than the server. I have a server with ~30 tools, but I only need one, so I turned the rest off. The official GitHub MCP server is a good example of this, it has tools for everything from creating gists to managing teams, and you might really only need it to search repos or read issues.

And often you just need web access - e.g. Claude knows the Github API very well, and is perfectly capable of using quite a bit of it via curl, and so a lot of the time it's worth testing if the LLM knows how to access something directly before you start adding tools and mcp servers

So is there a UI available to browse MCPs or is it API only?

Tried to find it but docs point to GitHub, GitHub points to docs and none seem to point to MCPs listing.

Yeah it's confusing. They mention https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io but it is just a redirect to https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/tree/main/d.... Like MCP itself there's still work to be done, it seems.

This is still an early preview. A UI is on the roadmap [0]. For now it is API only [1].

[0] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registry/blob/main/d... [1] https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/docs

This is actually a huge milestone and can be similar to ArtifactHUB in the CNCF space. ArtifactHUB generally is a great place to publish and look up Helm charts. Especially verified and and official badges help a lot.

[0]: https://artifacthub.io/

There really should be an indication of auth status for Remote MCPs on launch of this

The general challenge with auth is which IdP to use in the backend.

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