I (sort of) explained it a bit on the actual forum, but mostly it’s just a personal limitation:

• I don’t have the time or desire to spend the required amount of time to manage the server, promote and grow the community, and maintain the various little extra things that come with it.
• the community never took off to get enough members/traction - mostly because no of us were/are good at promoting and sharing the community consistently and efficiently.
• technically speaking, I think I’m in a bit over my head, and I was learning as I went, but little issues would require a lot of time and effort to learn to fix, and mostly just lead to burn out.
• I simply am not one that does well well with the long term commitments, and was hoping to build a community that was largely self managing after it started to grow, but 1. The community never actually got enough members 2. I bit off more than I could chew with sysadmin so it required more maintenance in the long term than I initially expected.

So in short, it’s mostly just a personal shortcoming. It might also be that the community never grew simply because the idea/implementation was poor, but I like to think that if I had done enough diligence in promoting and finding members it would have eventually gotten some traction.

Thanks for the support and kind words :)

Currently its hosted on a very small and cheap VPS (although I think potentially due to the small size of the VPS, scrapers and bots would overload the site as they navigated the wiki pages and crash it, leading me to turn on Cloudfare “under attack mode”…which could potentially cause other issues? Obviously I am a bit over my head with this sysadmin stuff, and is one of many reasons why I am a bit overwhelmed and closing)

The VPS is running Cloudron, which allows 2 apps to be run for free, which is running the wiki (mediawiki) and the forum (nodeBB). The great thing about Cloudron is that I can just save a backup and you can load the backups into your cloudron server and pretty much be instantly up and running (In theory, I haven’t done it before).

As for actual maintenance of the apps themselves, nodeBB is pretty easy to navigate and configure - just running through the admin page and changing settings as you need (and they have a good forum to ask questions of their responsive staff). The Wiki is where it gets more complicated, as I have a bunch of addons and javascript scripts that are being used to create the structure of the wiki. It should all be working, but with time obviously bugs will appear and will need fixes and such.

I know that I am not good at sticking with things and my motivation and effort I put on projects starts at lik 500% and then after I burn out it quickly fizzes away and I often move to another project (or at least take a long break) - and I knew this would be an issue in the long run to maintain this platform, so I set it up with the hopes that the wiki and community could essentially self regulate and build the platform together (sort of similar to wikipedia, in a small sense).

Anyways, that’s the quick and dirty rundown - but obviously if it’s something you or anybody else is genuinely interested in, then I would be glad to elaborate more if needed. Regardless, I appreciate the interest. Thank you!

It probably could have worked, but the forum software we are using (nodeBB) actually allows federated identities as well. Its not quite as seamless, but each forum category can be accessed as a community on lemmy/piefed as well. I am sure there are a lot of options we could have gone with, but nodeBB seemed like a good place to start. (if the community grows and expands, then of course we could explore options to switch if it becomes apparent that nodeBB doesnt work - but for now the main challenge is to just get people to actually join and participate)

You bring up some valid concerns about the connection between the wiki and forum - and it’s something we were bouncing around on how to best implement. My guess is that as our community grows, we can better adjust and adapt to find the optimal solution.

As of now, the premise is to have a wiki page for each project that acts as documentation and the actual “home” of the project - as it also allows people to contribute with version history and etc. meanwhile the forum “projects” category will act as the platform for discussion and networking. I will be the first to admit that the implementation may very well be flawed, but is meant to act as a starting point in which the community can nudge the platform to evolve in the direction that will suit the majority.

As for the distinction of this platform and others, I go a bit more into depth on the wiki about pages and such, but I’m short it’s that:

1. We are not a niche community. We want to bring people from different backgrounds together to collaborate and network. (Eg: GitHub is mostly programmers)
2. We encourage small contributions. We want to remove the stress and commitment of needing to dive all in to a single project, and instead foster the community itself, so that people can contribute small things to multiple projects, bolstering the open source and creative commons as a whole, rather than any one single project. (Hopefully that makes sense.)
3. The goal is to have this platform/community be “community owned/managed/etc”. Granted I am currently paying for th server and domain name, and someone has to have the “keys” to the system to protect sensitive data - but I back up everything to Codeberg so that if I die, disappear, etc… another individual can simply reupload the data and start another site. (A few trusted admins have full backup capabilities as well). In addition to just backups, I want the community to actually have individuals step up and take more active roles - have a group of stewards of the commons, rather than owners or founders. How this will work in practice I am not yet entirely sure…but the underlying intentions are that ownership of th community should belong to the collective, with individuals acting as stewards of the platform in the best interest of the majority.

Hope that answers the questions? Also, thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback :)

PS: if you’ve joined, I would appreciate it if you would post on the forum or upload your projects…as the more activity we get, the easier it will be to get new members on board and engaged.

Noted. Will add it to my to-do list. Thank you :)

Copy paste from another comment asking about LLM/AI use:

For a more detailed writeup on our current views: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics

But in short, we don’t want to dictate the parameters for each project, and want each project to set their own requirements. We do have a “notice”/“banner” on the wiki that we ask people to utilize for each project to be clear and transparent about their requirements for AI/LLM use in each project.

Same as I was going to ask. I am not familiar with any ne s reference piefed - granted I’m probably out of the loop since I’m not really a religious user of social sites.

Our platform is self hosted, not a piefed instance, but federated.

Also, I’m not tracking anything with piefed…is there some negative news about piefed?

@julian@community.nodebb.org is there any chance you might be able to clarify this? Is this the case, or am I mistaken?

This is part of NodeBB forum software, and settings in your user profile you can adjust what you receive. I think (unless I am mistaken, and I simply need to adjust the settings) that this is a blanket statement that covers the forum admins to adjust settings without violating consent. I will need to do some more research if this is even changeable on my end (both technically & legally).

On our end, we are hosting the nodeBB forum on a VPS, and are not doing any sort of telemetry or data gathering (except that information that nodeBB gathers for site usage data), and we don’t send any digest emails (other than what the individual sets up in their profile settings that get auto sent through the software).

I know that doesn’t necessarily fix the issue, but hope it at least clarifies it a little. I will look into this issue further though.

That is good advice, thanks. I will try that out.

And yes, I constantly remind myself to take it slow. . . But I seem to rarely listen to myself haha.

Yay! You’re the best ;)

If you have any projects or discussion to share, it would be much appreciated - as often the beginning stages are the hardest since there is not much content to interact with for new members

Ours is federated too :)

All super valid points, and I agree. I really appreciate the feedback :)

As for the “one more place to go”, I agree that I hate having more logins and such, but it felt worthwhile to have a dedicated space its own if we wanted to build a community that was more closely knit. The structure of a traditional forum allows discussions to last and not get buried. A small compromise is that the forum is federated, so each category can be accessed from the fediverse.

As for initial content - that was the plan, and we will slowly be working on it, but sadly I burnt myself out on actually creating the platform and needed a break - and now I am reattempting, but am currently in the process of IRL things that are preventing me actually working heavily on content/value for initial landing. But hopefully we will slowly be able to get actual content up to prevent the issue you described.

TLDR: I completely agree with you, and hopefully we will address the content issue eventually. In the meantime, I figured I would try to spread the word and hope a few individuals might be willing to add their projects or ideas.

We’re trying to be more than just coding projects, and really any project that is not under a closed license.

Just as an example, a couple of us designed board games. It can be things even like world building, CAD projects, tinkering, craft blueprints, etc.

While FOSS is pretty much centered around coding (the “software” in FOSS) we want to build a community where people can collaborate on more than just code.

Not sure if that makes any difference or not, but I figured it was worth pointing out :) - either way, thanks for the interest!

I’m honestly not sure how we will handle it as we grow, but for now I think that posting your project in the forums is more acceptable if you want to discuss it, but aren’t sure if it’s going to be openly licensed yet. As for the wiki, we will likely be more strict about the open licenses, since it is intended to be more of a collaboration space where others will contribute and adapt.

If you want to post about your project on the forum and you think you will likely pick an open license, just mention that you don’t yet have a license picked out and explain the situation.

Like I said, as we grow - we may get more strict with this if it’s taken advantage of, but if it’s posted in good faith and stated clearly, I’m ok with it for now.

Thanks! hope to see you over there. Since we are in the early stages of trying to establish our community - every interaction and contribution is greatly appreciated to get us off the ground :)

I agree, so many people disregard Debian, but if you’re not gaming and don’t need to keep up with the latest things - Debian is rock solid and most of your packages you can just use flatpak. For the majority of daily users who aren’t gaming, I think it’s a super solid choice.

As for the layout - yeah it’s the layout that the software nodeBB has set, and we could look into trying to customize the layout to something more intuitive. Thanks for the feedback :)

As for the potential for abuse - you’re right, of course - there will always be potential for abuse. However, the open source and creative commons community is what we are trying to align our community with, and will hopefully also contribute to building the community culture of collaboration in good spirit, without focusing so much on profit or business, but more on the collective good.