I think a lot of the long tail of open source projects are like this, the small treams and solo-contributors. Or at least that is what they put front-and-center

I think a lot of the long tail of open source projects are like this, the small treams and solo-contributors. Or at least that is what they put front-and-center. I know I've been guilty of doing it myself. "Our software is better because it's not made by Evilbook Partners, LTD". The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X. My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news. I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine. I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more). Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.