Spyke

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memes

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Times have changed

I know it's just a meme, and I don't want to be "that guy" but van life isn't actually as affordable as it's often made out to seem. Lots of hidden costs to take into account like where you can park and etc.

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Gimp 3.2 is officially released. The game has changed. Adobe just got punched in the face.

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Wow, never knew this existed. I usually don't use gimp all that much compared to inkscape - so I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble...but this is very nice. I honestly don't know what they wouldn't pull these settings into the default gimp, even if only as an alternative skin option you can select.

The major drawback of gimp for many people is the interface, I think. That's why blender has really taken off since it's UI/UX update.

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We are trying to grow a new FOSS collaboration community.

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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!

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Closing down our short lived Federated Community. (Would love for someone to take over)

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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). Of course, this requires actually building up a community of active members first, which was neither mine or the other staff members strong suites. But all that to say, if the community actually becomes the vision I had saw, you will hopefully have a community to help you manage the wiki and forum.

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!

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Creating a new Community for Creatives/Tinkerers - (Plans to Federate)

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Yeah, that's the plan :) just trying to see if I can get people initially interested and active in the community before I take the leap to actually paying for and setting up an entire nodeBB site. This free hosting option makes it easy to see if it's even worth pursuing further. But yeah, I'm excited to hopefully get transferred over to nodeBB, seems like a solid forum software, especially for modern day internet needs with their group chat capability for more of a "discord" like experience for people who are actively collaborating.

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We are trying to grow a new FOSS collaboration community.

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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.

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Closing down our short lived Federated Community. (Would love for someone to take over)

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This could possibly work. One of the main priorities of the other platform was to have a "slower" and more "old school" internet, and to try and foster genuine and lasting connections and collaboration - and while it's not impossible to foster that community within lemmy or piefed, it is a lot harder just on the way that threads and discussions are structured and buried over time. But something is obviously better than nothing.

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Closing down our short lived Federated Community. (Would love for someone to take over)

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LMAO, yeah pretty much. But to be fair, the name "UnfinishedProjects" is because the platform was to be targeting people like myself who love to work on projects, but often shy away from the commitment, discipline, and responsibility of seeing them through. Having a stack of "unfinished projects" is practically my calling card lmao. So while it is ironic...it's sort of fitting haha. Turns out I couldn't manage to even finish the project that was meant to contain the projects )_: hahha.

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New Forum Community.

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Thanks! You and the rest of the nodeBB community have been super helpful in getting us up and running, responding to bug reports, and etc.

So thank you very much for the awesome open source software - I can't wait to see how the software grows and evolves over time :)

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Closing down our short lived Federated Community. (Would love for someone to take over)

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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.