FedeProxy found funding. How do we ensure project success?

As of this month I’m lucky to be funded to work on fedeproxy, for the next 9 months. Lucky because I can’t shake the notion that the luck factor (15 projects out of 170) is the primary cause of the selection. And the first question in my mind is how to make use of this time to bootstrap something sustainable? It’s a tough one and as far as I can tell the vast majority of projects did not succeed in doing this. One thing is for certain: unless something is done differently and cleverly, the probability that fedeproxy momentum fades in 2022 is extremely high.

So the question is… what is your advice for someone in my position? What should I do?

4 Likes

And maybe the more pertinent question, since we’re in a federated and Free Software world, is what other people could do to leverage the momentum fedeproxy has now, to their advantage? How could someone take advantage of the work I’m doing to their own benefit? It could be financial (i.e. applying for a grant related to forge federation), or anything else really.

Will take a bit of time to read through the project.

We have a Gitta which we use to both run the technical/coding and the social organizing at #OMN, so AP would help a lot on the social/process side of using the site https://unite.openworlds.info

Love the #4opens documentation of the process, very interesting and helpful.

First of all I’d advise that alongside your development you keep a ‘community-building’ track running and reserve some of your time for that. Many of that need not take a lot of time, e.g. frequent masto updates on progress. Reacting to other toots and always name-drop FedeProxy with an url + hashtag to it. You may set up a gup.pe group for people to follow.

Simple things work too, e.g. stuck coding? Write a quick toot asking for help, and then do your regular solution search. Keep a blog to write a longer-form article now and then, and present Roadmap stuff. Might use Writefreely here.

I’d also invite you to get FedeProxy in #software and provide updates on federations / spec-related stuff. Partake in spec discussions, write FEP’s, join SocialCG meetups, etc.

Many people are quite interested in FedeProxy, what it might bring to development, and the new and interesting ways that AP is applied (i.e. beyond Microblogging). Play into that. Attract people in your forum.

Along the way many people will express needs and wishes that are far from your core concern (MVP). But maybe you can entice people to build related projects, ideally building on top of what you provide. This way they get a shared interest in contributing to the project.

And I’d focus some of my effort on the Gitea ForgeFed issue that @cjs has created. Get Gitea contributors to work independently on having an endpoint at their side, that interops with yours. In that light I would also consider hosting your code on Codeberg, which is dedicated to FOSS-only, and where Gitea team members are part of Codeberg team.

3 Likes

Thanks for the advice, I bookmarked this post as a reminder to re-read monthly: a kind of checklist of things that needs to be done :+1: Super useful.

I’m not sure I understand that part. Why would it be better to host the code on Codeberg rather than a self-hosted forge or https://forge.chapril.org or any other Free Software dedicated forge?

@anon20068248 My congratulations!
I am wondering whether your project has any connection to ForgeFed?

Thank you! And yes, the goal is to use forgefed and provide feedback to forgefed. A ideal situation would be that someone gets funding to continue the work done on forgefed.

Maybe not entirely. You were planning to maybe have multiple locations from a dogfooding perspective. A self-hosted gitlab + a provided gitea would fit that. Codeberg is a Community with people eager for Codeberg success. They are working on providing CI pipeline, Codeberg Pages (custom domain support) and open to other ideas (I posted Codeberg Gists as one). Their operational gitea often has commits that are not yet upstream. If gitea starts working on Forgefed, then you have a shared community space and good chance to find contributors there.

I believe that the ForgeFed project still has funding available. There’s an issue somewhere of that nature, providing a roadmap (thought it was created by @fr33domlover).

1 Like

I did not know that! I read the pages describing Codeberg and the blog but it does not show how Gitea authors are involved or how to follow the progress. I must be missing something?

See the last question in the Codeberg FAQ about the Gitea version + Patch level. I don’t know about others but @6543 on Codeberg is also a Gitea core team member. Might be a good idea to approach them and ask about pros and cons of such setup and ways in which you can collaborate together.

1 Like

Today was my monthly review of your advices @aschrijver

I’m not good at doing that although I should. I’ll keep that in mind for this week at least.

That’s progressing nicely :slight_smile:

1 Like