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@nikisweeting ArchiveBox is awesome and we'd really love it to be more awesome. And sustainable! I've posted issues and PRs for showstopper issues that took mo

@nikisweeting ArchiveBox is awesome and we'd really love it to be more awesome. And sustainable! I've posted issues and PRs for showstopper issues that took months to get merged in: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/issues/991 https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/issues/991 https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/pull/1026 https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/pull/1026 You have the opportunity for the community to lean in on ArchiveBox. I understand it's hard to do everything as a solo dev, we've seen many cases in the community where solo devs get burned out or have personal challenges that take priority etc. It's hard for us users to lean in on ArchiveBox when after a happy month of archiving, things start break and you're left with maintaining a branch of your own fixes that aren't in main. Meanwhile, your solution of soliciting one time donations just makes the whole project feel more rickety and fly-by-night. How about thinking bigger? We NEED ArchiveBox to be a real thing. Decentralized tooling for archiving is SO IMPORTANT. I care about it and I suspect many people do. I'm posting this so other people who care about it can also comment and chime in and suggest how it can become something we can rely on. Because archiving isn't just about the past, it's about the future. Maybe it needs to be a dev org of three committed part-time maintainers, and a small foundation that people recurrently support is what grants it? IDK. I'm not an expert at how to make open source resilient. There have been discussions about this in the past, but I think it's worth a serious look because ArchiveBox is IMPORTANT and I want it to work any month I decide to re-activate my interest in it. I invite people to discuss ways to make this valuable project more sustianable and resilient.

nikisweeting 2y ago
Let chat more. I'm almost ready to raise some seed money, hire a second staff dev or find a cofounder, and I'm looking for people that care deeply about the space. It's only been during the last few months that I decided to go all in on the project, so this is still just the first few pages of a new chapter in the project's history. (I should also mention that if you're a commercial entity relying on ArchiveBox, you can hire us for dedicated support and uptime guarantees. We have a closed source fork that has a much better test suite and lots of other goodies)
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Do you guys have a Discord by chance? I have a close friend who is insanely passionate about archiving, he has a personal instance of archivebox, and is working on a Video Downloading project as well. He has used it almost everyday and archived thousands of news articles over years. He's aware of a lot of the nuances.
  - nikisweeting 2y ago
    We have a Zulip which is similar to discord (but self hosted and it has better threading): https://zulip.archivebox.io https://zulip.archivebox.io
- nyx 2y ago
  It looks like you're doing great work here, thanks a bunch; looking forward to seeing this project develop. Selling custom integrations, managed instances, white-glove support with an SLA, and so on seems like a reasonable funding model for a project based on an open-source, self-hostable platform. But I'm a little disheartened to read that you're maintaining a closed fork with "goodies" in it. How do you decide which features (better test suite?) end up in the non-libre, payware fork of your software? If someone contributed a feature to the open-source version that already exists in the payware version, would you allow it to be merged or would you refuse the pull request?
  - nikisweeting 2y ago
    The idea with the plugin system is that plugins are just git repos containing <pluginname>/__init__.py, and you can add any set of git repo plugins you want to your instance. The marketplace will work by showing all git repos tagged with the "archivebox" tag on github. My approval is only needed for PRs to the archivebox core engine. More info on free vs paid + reasoning why it's not all open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41863539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41863539
- manofmanysmiles 2y ago
  I love this project. I "independently" "invented" it in my head the other day, and happy to see it already exists! I'd love to see blockchain proof/notary support. The ability to say "content matching this hash existed at this time. I'm exceptionally busy now but that being said, I may choose to contribute nonetheless. I'd love to connect directly, and will connect to the Zulip instance later. If we align on values, I may be able to connect you with some cash. People often call me an "anarchist" or "libertarian", though I'm just me, not labels necessary.

nikisweeting 2y ago

Let chat more. I'm almost ready to raise some seed money, hire a second staff dev or find a cofounder, and I'm looking for people that care deeply about the space. It's only been during the last few months that I decided to go all in on the project, so this is still just the first few pages of a new chapter in the project's history. (I should also mention that if you're a commercial entity relying on ArchiveBox, you can hire us for dedicated support and uptime guarantees. We have a closed source fork that has a much better test suite and lots of other goodies)

giancarlostoro 2y ago
Do you guys have a Discord by chance? I have a close friend who is insanely passionate about archiving, he has a personal instance of archivebox, and is working on a Video Downloading project as well. He has used it almost everyday and archived thousands of news articles over years. He's aware of a lot of the nuances.
- nikisweeting 2y ago
  We have a Zulip which is similar to discord (but self hosted and it has better threading): https://zulip.archivebox.io https://zulip.archivebox.io
nyx 2y ago
It looks like you're doing great work here, thanks a bunch; looking forward to seeing this project develop. Selling custom integrations, managed instances, white-glove support with an SLA, and so on seems like a reasonable funding model for a project based on an open-source, self-hostable platform. But I'm a little disheartened to read that you're maintaining a closed fork with "goodies" in it. How do you decide which features (better test suite?) end up in the non-libre, payware fork of your software? If someone contributed a feature to the open-source version that already exists in the payware version, would you allow it to be merged or would you refuse the pull request?
- nikisweeting 2y ago
  The idea with the plugin system is that plugins are just git repos containing <pluginname>/__init__.py, and you can add any set of git repo plugins you want to your instance. The marketplace will work by showing all git repos tagged with the "archivebox" tag on github. My approval is only needed for PRs to the archivebox core engine. More info on free vs paid + reasoning why it's not all open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41863539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41863539
manofmanysmiles 2y ago
I love this project. I "independently" "invented" it in my head the other day, and happy to see it already exists! I'd love to see blockchain proof/notary support. The ability to say "content matching this hash existed at this time. I'm exceptionally busy now but that being said, I may choose to contribute nonetheless. I'd love to connect directly, and will connect to the Zulip instance later. If we align on values, I may be able to connect you with some cash. People often call me an "anarchist" or "libertarian", though I'm just me, not labels necessary.