Just came back in from some balcony work. The potted plants were huddling against the cold and now we’ve moved them to the edge of the balcony again. More exposure, for sure: wind, rain, and sun.
I recently saw @vidak thinking about setting up a server where people could host Gemini or Gopher content, and how nobody really joined their previous effort of building something for the benefit of others, a tilde server. It felt like a very familiar problem.
All I can say is that people can ask for wiki and capsule hosting on my site and only one person has taken me up on it. They created a test page and abandoned it. I think such efforts don’t come easy. I remember starting out with Emacs Wiki and I still feel that I created the first one thousand pages on my own before other people started contributing on a regular basis. To start group efforts alone is a setup for failure. It’s rare for these efforts to succeed because most of the time people don’t actually have a need for the things you’d like to build.
It is a problem if you want to help others and build something for the community and then people don’t share your values. My wife doesn’t want help in using Emacs or the shell on most days of the year. And the problems that she actually needs help with involve her work laptop, Windows, Outlook, and government web apps. There is no overlap. Similarly, my coworkers don’t care about Emacs or Lisp, and I don’t want to work on Java and Postgres in my free time. There is no overlap.
So how do you find the things that you’d both like to build and that other people actually need? Under capitalism, the answer would be to figure out what the demand is, and do the work for money whether you like it or not. Sometimes, when there is no demand, there’s also “demand creation”: tell people what shiny things they need to add to their life. But that doesn’t really help anybody. Attention is already scarce, our lives are full, we should use less raw materials, less energy. Demand creation is part of the problem.
I imagine that what would work best is when you throw ideas out there all the time. Talk about the projekts you’re thinking about before you do anything at all. Very very rarely a few of your friends (not Internet strangers) think it’s really cool and the three of you should do it. And then something great can happen.
Conversely, if you are going to actually do something, focus on the things that bring you joy as an individual. Talk about them, too, of course. If other people love it, that’s great.
Also, help others where you can. You might not want to build the thing they need, but as you help them out, perhaps you’ll learn to like what would be actually useful to them.
That’s where I am, at least. Sometimes, one or two walk alongside you for a bit, and then it’s back to the alone fun.
The project I was very enthusiastic about last year:
Capsules are single-person spaces where the geminaut (you) can upload files. – Transjovian Capsules Explained
Transjovian Capsules Explained
These days I’m more interested into playing role-playing games again. 😁
#Philosophy #Programming