If it’s free, it’s not competing.

If you want to make something, go ahead and build it.

Artists don’t compete with other artists

I'm reminded of a time I found myself using an open source tool on github and finding it severely out of date on sources of information it was using to operate. I made a fork, spent a few hours updating, committed that code and put in a pull request with the original developer so they could merge it back into their original. 5 Years later, no response. 🤣

People abandon projects for various reasons or only work with the scarce free time they have. You may find someone interested in a healthy competition, but it might be more likely they back off when they see someone pick up the torch and do what they no longer can.

Nah OP, that's just the nature of the ecosystem. We have more terminal emulators and text editors than we know what to do with and people continue making more. That being said, if your project idea is extremely similar to an existing project, you should check to see if the devs of that project would be interested in your ideas since you could collaborate with them if they are.

Lemmy and Kbin both fill the same niche. They can coexist peacefully. There is nothing wrong with trying it your own way. One of the great things about reddit was the app ecosystem that allowed all users to pick their favorite. My favorite was BaconReader, which wasn't particularly popular, but really worked for me. I'm glad that the developers of BaconReader didn't decide the market was already too crowded.

I would recommend anyone making a Lemmy app, especially open source apps, document the stuff that was hard for them in making the app so others can learn and not have to fight the same battle.

Are you planning on making a GTK4 Lemmy frontend? That would be awesome!

Sounds like you have a great opportunity to collaborate on technical details, etc.. but still have separate projects. More power to you!

Now if you got more specific and the other author happened to have beat you in a student council election then I'd say it's probably time to forgive and forget.

There are already 5 or so Android apps for Lemmy, at least 2 iPhone apps and 2 Linux apps on Flathub. Go ahead.

If the available software doesn't work as you want it to and you have the skill and time to make something you like go ahead. Often enough in the open source world devs of "competing" programs actually help each other.

So in the end you will just make the world a better place with your contribution.

Immoral? No, not at all. A waste of resources? Maybe. Depends. Maybe you are better off contributing to the other project, maybe not.

FOSS shit is built to be reproduced. if you wanted to fork somebody's project and build your own thing on top of it, that's in the spirit of open source. if they didn't want it to happen, they wouldn't use a FOSS license. if you can do that, then building your own thing that does similar stuff is certainly not a problem. FOSS isn't competitive, its collaborative. everybody who contributes is doing a good thing, even if that's by building more options for people.

Maybe this book would be of interest to you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar . It is a bit dated, but nevertheless great read about OpenSource movement.