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Interesting project. Some advice: 1. Very few people care about a "free and open-source social network built with and steered by the community". You can't bui

Interesting project. Some advice: 1. Very few people care about a "free and open-source social network built with and steered by the community". You can't build a social network for just those people. It'll feel empty, and they'll leave. You need to attract lots of people who don't care about that. 2. Get rid of your landing page. See #1 for the reason. When people land on your domain they should be prompted to sign up, or look around. That's what a social network is for, after all. 3. Focus on making it work. Get to a MVP. Quietly open it to the public. Call it a beta. Don't waste time on press releases. 4. If you can't make it work, make it look like it works. No one wants to join a social media site that isn't working. "Eh, I'll join in a few months" and they'll never come back again. 5. Stay true to your principles! But keep it classy! Remember when websites would have a little "fork me on github" button in the upper-right corner? That served as a subtle indication that the project was open. That's all you need to capture the group of people I mentioned in #1. Here: https://github.com/tholman/github-corners https://github.com/tholman/github-corners

denysvitali 4y ago
Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciated! Unfortunately some of the points you talked about assume that the MVP is available (which it is) and that someone should decide everything beforehand, reach a point where the product is good enough to be used by anyone and the project is basically bootstrapped. This goes a bit against my idea of a community-steered project, because the decisions taken at the beginning might be wrong to the point that you'd have to re-build everything from scratch to correct them. Do you have a suggestion here? It's also true that a community like HN doesn't like projects that aren't ready to be used (see some comments here). I sadly think we'll end up having an MVP that wasn't built by the community and start asking for ideas / contributions at that point - which as stated before goes entirely against my initial ideas
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  How do you see when "the community" has decided? Won't "the community" be different after some time (due to growth, due to people leaving ...) "We are open for everything" rarely works to form a community. Why should people in est time in that? Maybe they do and then things go another way than many individually want. You need a foundation to which people attach or not otherwise there are enough other projects to be involved where I know they match my interests.
  - denysvitali 4y ago
    The community of course will be always changing and there might be different ideas over time. The goal would probably be to keep most people as happy as possible - possibly customizing parts of the experience via feature flags so that (at least on the client side) everyone is able to match their likings. This is just an idea though, it might be way more complicated than this and we'll need to think about this. Not only different people have different ideas, but also the same people might shift their ideas over time - we just have to be open to change over time and evolve as the community evolves.

denysvitali 4y ago

Thank you for the feedback! Really appreciated! Unfortunately some of the points you talked about assume that the MVP is available (which it is) and that someone should decide everything beforehand, reach a point where the product is good enough to be used by anyone and the project is basically bootstrapped. This goes a bit against my idea of a community-steered project, because the decisions taken at the beginning might be wrong to the point that you'd have to re-build everything from scratch to correct them. Do you have a suggestion here? It's also true that a community like HN doesn't like projects that aren't ready to be used (see some comments here). I sadly think we'll end up having an MVP that wasn't built by the community and start asking for ideas / contributions at that point - which as stated before goes entirely against my initial ideas

johannes1234321 4y ago
How do you see when "the community" has decided? Won't "the community" be different after some time (due to growth, due to people leaving ...) "We are open for everything" rarely works to form a community. Why should people in est time in that? Maybe they do and then things go another way than many individually want. You need a foundation to which people attach or not otherwise there are enough other projects to be involved where I know they match my interests.
- denysvitali 4y ago
  The community of course will be always changing and there might be different ideas over time. The goal would probably be to keep most people as happy as possible - possibly customizing parts of the experience via feature flags so that (at least on the client side) everyone is able to match their likings. This is just an idea though, it might be way more complicated than this and we'll need to think about this. Not only different people have different ideas, but also the same people might shift their ideas over time - we just have to be open to change over time and evolve as the community evolves.