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."

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.

Well, I cross posted this to the !opensource@lemmy.ml community, and one person showed a possible interest in continuing it, so I guess we can give it a small amount of time to see if someone actually wants to take on the platform, and if not - likely just do a single standalone community as you suggested.

Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks for the support and kind words :)

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!

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.

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.

It probably could have worked, but the forum software we are using (nodeBB) actually allows federated identities as well. Its not quite as seamless, but each forum category can be accessed as a community on lemmy/piefed as well. I am sure there are a lot of options we could have gone with, but nodeBB seemed like a good place to start. (if the community grows and expands, then of course we could explore options to switch if it becomes apparent that nodeBB doesnt work - but for now the main challenge is to just get people to actually join and participate)

Yeah that makes sense. I will likely need to adjust the wording of the site then, to ensure it is clear the intentions. Thank you for the feedback :)

I’ll add it to my to-do list :)

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.

Noted. Will add it to my to-do list. Thank you :)

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.

Same as I was going to ask. I am not familiar with any ne s reference piefed - granted I’m probably out of the loop since I’m not really a religious user of social sites.

Our platform is self hosted, not a piefed instance, but federated.

Also, I’m not tracking anything with piefed…is there some negative news about piefed?

Read here for a more detailed writeup: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics

But essentially we actually heavily encourage copyleft licensing. Copyright is different then copyleft (at least from my understanding - but maybe I need to reword the sentence you quoted?)

As for who controls the system, read more here: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Vision

In short, I “own” the VPS, but I am trying my best to make the platform belong to the community, while I simply act as a steward of the commons. I back up nonsensitive data publicly to Codeberg, and share actual backups with other admins. The goal is to have the community outlast any one individual. If anyone ever wants to, they can essentially copy the platform to a new VPS and Domain, and continue the platforms operations.

In practice, there may be a few hurdles as I am inexperienced and still learning - but hopefully the systems and operations will evolve with th community if successful. I want the platform to be a commons, not “belonging” to anyone - but stewards that may come and go. Outlasting me or any other admins.

Hope that answers your questions, and we are always open to feedback. It’s tough getting a community off the ground, and we are just a couple of individuals who are passionate about the idea.

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 eacy 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.

Thanks for the interest! As I mentioned on one of the other comments, our community is still small so if you are able to share or get involved it would greatly help build engagement for other members as well. Hope to see you over there :)

Sorry, just saw this reply. Thanks for registering :)

As our current number of members are low, it would be helpful if you have some stuff to share, or stop by the introduction category and introduce yourself! Hope to see you over there if not already.

@julian@community.nodebb.org is there any chance you might be able to clarify this? Is this the case, or am I mistaken?