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
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:
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."