Hello!

I’ve been using FOSS on my phone, laptop and desktop for a few years now and never had the opportunity or the bravery to contribute to any project.

I’ve been thinking for a while now, how could I give something to the community?

I’m a web developer, so obviously that’s what this project idea is all about. A website where we can have a few things, very useful for the FOSS community.

I wanted to ask the lemmy community what they think about it, because maybe it already exists something similar or if you have some ideas or feedback.

The idea:

As mentioned before, I’m planing on a creation of a “central hub” for the FOSS community.

I was thinking on a website where we can have:

  • Events/Calendar: A place where we can see in a simple way all the events, meets up or similar in the FOSS community, with a calendar to see the exact dates and events with a filter to be able to select specific countries or tags.

  • Documentation: A place where we can create documentation for projects that don’t have the documentation or is very basic.

  • Ideas: A place where we can share ideas for projects, look for people to/for help or look for feedback and try to make them real.

  • Tracker: A place where we can log in with our GitHub/Codeberg/GitLab… accounts and be able to track all the project we are contributing in a simple way.

These are my early ideas and what I’ve been thinking about. Maybe some of them won’t see the light, maybe all of them or even more things will see light.

I would love to see what you guys have to say about this idea!

Thanks for taking your time reading this!

  • moonpiedumplings@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    In my opinion, you are starting too big. It’s better to start smaller. Many locations have a “Linux User Group” or “hackerspace” or a “Computing Club”. (Those are exact keywords you can try searching for).

    And often times, those organizations host their own small set of services for their members. For example, when I was searching for help on how to set up something with Kubernetes, I came across this blog, where the blog author hosts services for their “Chaos Computing Club”, like proxmox, nextcloud (has a calendar app), matrix, and forgejo.

    Instead of trying to spin up a set of services for the whole “FOSS Community” start smaller and just host for your local groups. Maybe your local hackerspace already hosts these services.

    To find local meetups, I checked out https://meetup.com/, which has a lot.

    As for me personally, I am trying to put together services for my Cybersecurity club at my school, right now I have centralized identity, and virtual machine hosting for members to access and play with, but I want to also host extra services like the stuff you mentioned, because the reasons why you want them are good.

    On my blog, I discuss my plans and steps: https://moonpiedumplings.github.io/projects/build-server-6/

    I think creating a “FOSS hub” overall is a really really big challenge because all of these groups that make up the FOSS world have a heterogeneous set of overall interests, and an even more heterogeneous set of users.

    A simple example is the language barrier. Fun fact: There exist alternatives to apps that primarily have English as their first language, but in other languages first, centering around the communities those languages are used in. For example, the opendesk docs are in German first. Of course, there are English docs for things like engagement, but the problem is that —

    For something like a FOSS hub, user engagement is critical, and one of the best ways to have engaged users is dogfooding, where users contribute back to this software they use. But with software that treats one language or another as a first class citizen, there is becomes a bump, when users want to dogfood.

    The other problem is that the users themselves have different needs and wants. One user or set of users hates email and never wants to touch it. Another wants to exclusively use plain email for everything, including as an alternative to code forges, discussion platforms, and scheduling systems. One set of users prefers discord, the others prefer irc. They meet in the middle on matrix, but this other set of users hates matrix due to being VC funded and it’s just a clusterfuck.

    You cannot make both groups of users happy. When you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody.

    What you can do, however, is catch the needs of your local groups and slowly expand from there. I think a FOSS Hub is possible, but I think trying to start it as a foss hub is bound for failure because the scope is too large.

    I think the closest thing right now is disroot, which hosts a lot of services, but again Disroot uses XMPP whereas some people may prefer Matrix for this usecase, and plenty of other nitpicks.

    • zagielito@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      1 day ago

      Thanks for the incredible feedback!! I think you are right, this is a very big and ambitious project and i should start smaller and grow from there.

      Ive been reading some user who likes the “ideas” part and they’ve been giving good feedback about that.

      I’m thinking of starting with the “ideas” part and change the focus a bit.

      Change ideas for project and have 2 sections.

      • new ideas: People can share they new ideas to have some feedback, help… anything they want
      • existing projects: where people can share, discuss and discover alternatives open source softwate to the non open source ones.

      Thanks again for the incredible feedback!

  • iopq@lemmy.world
    5·
    2 days ago

    The most important part for me is discussion of new or existing projects. Right now I’m just typing in alternative to name of proprietary software into a search engine

    Maybe that’s actually how to approach it, for each project name some proprietary software it can replace in the order of what percentage of functionality it can replace

    • Ferk@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 days ago

      The thing is that this would mean you also need to list the non-free projects that you are looking an alternative for (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to map them to their free software equivalents). And in order to not repeat the same lists, you will end up also having to list equivalents between closed source software (since the alternatives to Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop are likely gonna be the same).

      This essentially would make it a subset of existing places like https://alternativeto.net/ where you can find alternatives to a software and filter to only show the alternatives that are open source.

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        Except it wouldn’t have listings for non-free software, it would just mention “similar” software in some box down the page

      • iopq@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, would be cool to feature all of the projects and let people comment why they like it over the other ones.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            Yeah, that would be cool. I want a curated list of up-to-date open source software and a lot of times websites like https://alternativeto.net/ give you some abandoned personal project as the only open source alternative. But that’s because it’s not focusing on open source software

            • zagielito@sh.itjust.worksOP
              2·
              2 days ago

              Ok, noted!!

              Changing the direction to the project to something more focused in discussing new and existing projects would be nice!

              A few of you are commenting about that or something similar.

              I’m thinking about two sections in the “projects” part.

              One would be what you are suggesting, a list with open source projects, to be able to look for new or already well established alternatives to non open source projects, with some short description to highlight their advantages.

              The second one would be a place to share ideas/look for contributors/find a project you are interested in and contribute…

              I’ll start thinking how to do that as soon as i have some time!

              Thanks for the feedback!

    • zagielito@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yes, i mentioned it in another comment. Change the focus for the idead part and transform it to projects, where people can share ideas for new project, showcase existing ones, look for people to help, etc…

      • IsaamoonKHGDT_6143@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        You could use CC BY 4.0 as a first option or the various options offered by Creative Commons, but you could also use the FreeBSD Documentation License, GDFL, or Free Art License.

        But if you want it to be in the public domain, you can use CC0 or a license equivalent to the public domain.