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How do i ask for contributors to my open source projects?
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Programming
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I think most open-source contributions come from a tiny fraction of users who initially get involved because they want to improve the project or fix a bug for their own usage
Exactly, in other words, you get people involved by making your tools good and advertising them to increase usage.
Write good documentation, make it user-friendly, create beautiful landing pages for the repository (i.e. readme), create a marketing/project website, be responsive in discussion forums, etc etc
https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat https://github.com/positive-intentions/dim
i dont think my documentation is as clear as it could be, but i dont think its unclear: https://positive-intentions.com/blog/dim-functional-webcomponents
i think i have put efforts towards a good landing page, readme, documentation etc. id appriciate if you critique those.
I would immediately get rid of the warning for unstableness in both projects. They are simply unnecessarily self-deprecating and "stay away" markers. When would you remove them?... I don't know your projects, but it's incredibly unlikely that they are worse in those regards than basically any other software project. It's always the user's fault if they use some unestablished thing in production, you're not responsible for that and have to help them learn that.
Being experimental can be expressed through a 0.x.x versioning scheme. Having bugs is expressed by the issue tracker, and in any case not unique at all. Incomplete features is something anyone will see if they decide to try it.
The chat thing seems like one of a million chat things, why is this chat solution better than any other already existing one? Needs to be clearly expressed as the first thing. tool like this suffers from adaption usefulness, it's only useful if people use it, why would you use it if no one uses it.
The other thing looks very niche, so also not surprising that it's not used that much.
I don't know, I wouldn't worry about it that much. Kind of confused anyway why you'd "look for" contributers. Seems kinda like you want to simply get a following for ego reasons or something.
thanks for you thoughts.
i previously didnt have the "unstable" warning. this results is people saying that i should make it more clear. i think the project is in its early enough stages for it to be sensible to include there. im already planning on breaking changes which could make things worse so this is something i hope make it clear to users about the status of the project. before i had that notice, i would get complains from people that the app is terrible and doesnt work (which was basically true because it still is a work in progress and full of bugs.). i added a bit of a polish on it so it leads people to think its a finished product.
im looking for contributors on the dim repo because there part things i would like to do (and tried), but reached the limits of what i understand. i can learn and figure it out if i pour more time into it, but i have already poured time into it. im hoping someone with relevent experience would want to help.
im hoping to get a following on lemmy, mastodon, reddit in order to get traction on the projects. as it stand its just me and so its a bit of an uphill to get traction on something like the chat project. what you might be interpreting as ego, is a mannerism i have to adopt if i want to actively promote it as being a "secure chat system". otherwise, feedback is a lot more dismissive about the project. that would surely sink the project immidiately.
im a developer not a sales person... but since working on these project ive learnt to moderate how cautious my tone should be to balance the communication of technical details as well as promoting something. i dont think i do the best job of it, but im still in the learning process.