You can track the main post on our community while it is still up (https://forum.unfinishedprojects.net/topic/46/unfinishedprojects-will-be-closing-down.)

But essentially our community that was started not too long ago was an experiment by myself and two others who were hoping to create a space on the fediverse that acted as a sort of Commons for people to iterate and work on various Openly licensed projects together (of all types, to include not only software but all various disciplines). See here for more on what our community hoped to become: [ https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Vision ]

In short, it is a combination of a federated forum and a public Wiki, where individuals can collaborate and contribute to a wide array of projects - using their diverse skills, knowledge and experience - to create a hub of open projects... and allowing individuals to make small contributions without needing to commit long term to any one project.

The reason I am posting this is not to promote the platform (because I have already tried and mostly failed), but because I truly still believe in the ideas and vision that we had for it. Ultimately, I just realized that I am not able to be the one to bring this vision to life.

Although I know it's unlikely, it would be nice if someone else saw the same potential for this platform to create a space on the internet that fights against the internet that "big tech" has been pushing for it to become.

So all that to say, I hope that this short lived experiment can either inspire someone else to iterate and improve on our failed attempt, or maybe even "take over" the already existing platform.

Either way, it was a short lived experiment, but I enjoyed the journey and the few connections I made along the way! If nothing else, it helped me reflect on our current standing of internet spaces, and what they might someday be able to evolve into given we have enough buy-in from like minded individuals.

I know most of you have probably never heard of our platform, but for those of you that have and engaged with it in any way, I appreciate your time and I apologize for any wasted time or effort in our shutting down after only launching recently.

  • Anthony and the Unfinished Projects Team

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[–] 10 points 4 months ago (1 child)

What would it take to keep it alive? A Hetzner VPS, a reasonable self-hosting?

I've got some resources available, plenty of bandwidth, and could possibly help out depending on needs. I also don't know much about hosting fediverse stuff, but I do have some of my own stuff and services I host already.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    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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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    :( that's very sad to hear, I love the idea. Thank you Anthony and the rest of the team, and best of luck in your future endeavors

    I hope someone will pick it up

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    This. This is what it's all about.

    ❤️ 1
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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Barely any users or posts—how much work and time was actually put into this and why give it up?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 months ago

    Time spent was a lot of hours, but I don't know how much. I pretty much spent ALL my free time on the project for a couple of months, just hyperfocused on getting it set up and working with two others to get it ready. But to be honest, a decent amount of the time was spent trail and error with learning sysadmin type stuff, figuring out which platforms were best (finally settling on nodeBB and MediaWiki), and then a decent amount of time actually setting up the platforms.

    The most difficult and time consuming was probably setting up the MediaWiki, since I ended up doing a decent amount of scripts and plugins to get the functionality where I wanted it (after a lot of redoing my efforts with trial and error if how we wanted the layout to work). Then of course the actual page content on a lot of the wiki pages like our vision, ethics, etc.

    I'm just going to copy paste a reply to another post for why I gave up:

    "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."

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    All these words and no mention of why it failed?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 4 months ago

    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.

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  • 11 comments in c/fediverse@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 28 points 4 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    How about making it live on in a smaller form as a community on an existing instance, no additional hosting needed? There's already one with the same name on LW. Or we could create a new one for people to move to.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I scrolled a bit through the communities. We already have several "DIY" communities. But they're mostly somewhat inactive, except the slrpnk.net one. Not sure where to go with this. Eiter we just use that one. Or make a new one. I think I could mod some community on piefed.social. But the question is whether that should be some more general maker lounge. I like the unfinished projects idea. But maybe it's just too much niche of a niche... But if it's just another DIY community, maybe we rather post a bit in the already existing community... I'm really not sure what's best here.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    It's a great idea. I hope you succeed in some form.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    I think the best way to make it work for the fediverse is to have it be accessible by all instances (sans Threads).

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    I'd second that not being a community here likely didn't help. Though a while ago I asked a question on the linked window manager community but my comment didn't federate.

    For me though, I actually finished the last thing I started but couldn't share it (system issues still) so that sort of killed motivation. So I have more of a problem of not starting right now. I have a couple of ideas, but the start for either isn't obvious to me. And I don't expect semi-niche language help, though maybe general structure advice would've been possible.

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