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.

Some forums already federate with lemmy. More will in the future. Setting up email notifications means you don't have to visit multiple sites each day.

You bring up some valid concerns about the connection between the wiki and forum - and it's something we were bouncing around on how to best implement. My guess is that as our community grows, we can better adjust and adapt to find the optimal solution.

As of now, the premise is to have a wiki page for each project that acts as documentation and the actual "home" of the project - as it also allows people to contribute with version history and etc. meanwhile the forum "projects" category will act as the platform for discussion and networking. I will be the first to admit that the implementation may very well be flawed, but is meant to act as a starting point in which the community can nudge the platform to evolve in the direction that will suit the majority.

As for the distinction of this platform and others, I go a bit more into depth on the wiki about pages and such, but I'm short it's that:

1. We are not a niche community. We want to bring people from different backgrounds together to collaborate and network. (Eg: GitHub is mostly programmers)
2. We encourage small contributions. We want to remove the stress and commitment of needing to dive all in to a single project, and instead foster the community itself, so that people can contribute small things to multiple projects, bolstering the open source and creative commons as a whole, rather than any one single project. (Hopefully that makes sense.)
3. The goal is to have this platform/community be "community owned/managed/etc". Granted I am currently paying for th server and domain name, and someone has to have the "keys" to the system to protect sensitive data - but I back up everything to Codeberg so that if I die, disappear, etc... another individual can simply reupload the data and start another site. (A few trusted admins have full backup capabilities as well). In addition to just backups, I want the community to actually have individuals step up and take more active roles - have a group of stewards of the commons, rather than owners or founders. How this will work in practice I am not yet entirely sure...but the underlying intentions are that ownership of th community should belong to the collective, with individuals acting as stewards of the platform in the best interest of the majority.

Hope that answers the questions? Also, thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback :)

PS: if you've joined, I would appreciate it if you would post on the forum or upload your projects...as the more activity we get, the easier it will be to get new members on board and engaged.

What's up on piefed.zip?

Copy paste from another comment asking about LLM/AI use:

For a more detailed writeup on our current views: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics

But in short, we don't want to dictate the parameters for each project, and want each project to set their own requirements. We do have a "notice"/"banner" on the wiki that we ask people to utilize for each project to be clear and transparent about their requirements for AI/LLM use in each project.

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!

Projects need other skills, like translators and artists too.

This is part of NodeBB forum software, and settings in your user profile you can adjust what you receive. I think (unless I am mistaken, and I simply need to adjust the settings) that this is a blanket statement that covers the forum admins to adjust settings without violating consent. I will need to do some more research if this is even changeable on my end (both technically & legally).

On our end, we are hosting the nodeBB forum on a VPS, and are not doing any sort of telemetry or data gathering (except that information that nodeBB gathers for site usage data), and we don't send any digest emails (other than what the individual sets up in their profile settings that get auto sent through the software).

I know that doesn't necessarily fix the issue, but hope it at least clarifies it a little. I will look into this issue further though.

Yay! You're the best ;)

If you have any projects or discussion to share, it would be much appreciated - as often the beginning stages are the hardest since there is not much content to interact with for new members