How To Spread Word About My FOSS Project?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm in a bit of a bind with an open source web software project of mine. It's a very small project that I've been developing for over three years. By now it's got a promising feature set, but very few users and virtually no community around it. The problem is that people I have asked to try it refuse to do so because it doesn't have a thriving community. It's an infinite loop: without users, we won't have a community, and without a community, users aren't coming. So, Slashdot, my question is: how can I build a community and help get the word out about a project led by 2 people and with only 5-6 regulars on our forum and IRC?"

Comments

Talk to your users

[alain94040]

1. Developers are king. If you could attract one more developer, your project would stand a much higher chance of success.

2. Just because you open-sourced your project doesn't mean it's useful to anyone. No matter how much we geeks don't like marketing, you have to think hard about your users: where are they, what do they care about and what do they really need?

It's normal for all new projects to languish for a while. If you think twitter was an instant success, remember that it had 2 years of null traffic before taking off. Go out and ask users what they want. Think. Then implement. Your #1 potential mistake today: feature creep. Don't think that if only you added this one more feature, the crowds would come. If anything, try to simplify things :-) and start communicating (posting on slashdot is not ideal, you should post wherever your users are, not talk to developers).

Re:Talk to your users

[Bigjeff5]

You didn't do well in reading comprehension in school, I'm guessing.

The poster asked about attracting users. MOST of the GP's post was regarding attracting users. Slashdot really doesn't make a very good advertising vehicle for attracting new users, it's a one-shot deal and that's pretty much it. Plus, most Slashdot folks are going to do exactly as he described - they'll say "hey that looks neet, but I don't want to mess with it if it doesn't have a good community", and with only one shot to make an impression you are likely to get pitifully few new users. Getting involved in a general OSS user's forum is a much better idea, as you can build a presence and start attracting users in spite of a lack of community.

For the exact same reasons, Slashdot is probably mediocre at best for attracting developers. However, getting involved in a good sized OSS developer's forum would be a great place to both advertise to try to attract new developers and to get more advice about getting your project out in the open.

Re:Talk to your users

[mattack2]

I suspect they purposefully didn't give a link to it or name it, so that the thread wouldn't be perceived as an ad, and would simply be looking for general advice that could be applicable to others.

This would have been a great start

[stoolpigeon]

If there were any info. on what the project is and where to check it out. (I realize a lot of people would have made snarky comments if that info had been included too. A regular catch 22 -- but this is a great opportunity and you should post a description and link to the project in this thread.)

Without any specifics I would think most answers are going to be just as generic. Post about it in different message boards, post about it at aggregator type sites (reddit, digg) - use twitter, facebook or whatever else might help people find out about it.

Who are the intended users? Where would those people be that you might show up and promote your project? Are their user groups that might be a good place to frequent?

Would a publication/site that deals with FOSS or whatever problem your project solves be interested in doing a write-up? Will they accept one from someone on the project or one of the users?

If it runs on Linux is it available through the package management systems of the major distros?

Re:It's simple

[SQLGuru]

And some product, no matter how great they are at what they do will never appeal to a large crowd because of the focus. For instance, anyone maintaining a FOSS project targetting left-handed fim-bozzles will only ever appeal to people interested in left-handed fim-bozzles not matter how good of a product your FOSS iLHFB app is. Making friends will help it grow, but making friends with left-handed fim-bozzle enthusiasts will help your project grow even more.

Re:Seriously

[Eudial]

You have a crew of nerds here who are all about open source and you refer to your project as "an open source web software project of mine" and are asking for more users?!

You must be new here.

It's kinda sad that you didn't put it in the summary, as others pointed out before me, you really did miss out. Good luck getting it in in the comments, everybody who skims the summaries won't even see it...

If he -had- posted it in the article, 70% of the comments would berate him for slashvertisement. So it's a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Make it do something useful

[takowl]

I've been involved with a project which fitted this description almost perfectly: FOSS webapp which was dependent on a community it never really had. I almost thought the question could be about it, until I visited its page to find that it's being closed down. It may sound obvious, but I think what really did for that project was that it didn't do anything people could already do. Specifically, a large part of its functionality was replicating things that Facebook did, and maybe 99% of its target users were on Facebook. Without a compelling reason to use it, it never really took off, and the developers weren't enthused enough to create the grand new features that had been planned.

Getting critical mass in the first place is hard. I wonder if there's any stories out there about how Facebook/Myspace/Twitter first got started. As others have said, you'll need to sell it to your friends first, then work at keeping them happy until they're happy to recommend it to their friends. Perhaps focus at first on the non-social aspects of the site, that don't depend on community, then be ready to shift to a more social model once you've got a couple of dozen users. An empty forum is just depressing, but some old-fashioned content is useful even for the very first visitor.

Oh, and since everyone's busy berating you for not giving the name: well done on not Slashvertising! Although I admit I'm also curious about it.

Ah-HAH! YACMS!

[gdek]

*Now* we know why no one's using your open source project -- because it's Yet Another CMS!

If you're trying to drive a new project in a space that already has a clear incumbent, you're in for a tough climb.

If you're trying to drive a new project in a space that already has several clear incumbents, you're in for a *really* tough climb.

If you're trying to drive a new project in a space that already has several clear incumbents and hundreds of failures, you're in for... ...well, you see where I'm going here.

I'm sure your CMS is different. It's sensitive and nurturing and really cares about me in a way that those other CMSes don't, and would never throw me out of the car for getting drunk at Andy's party that night. I get it. But when you're competing against the Star Quarterback of CMS projects, you *must* define what is unique about your project, and you must *market* that uniqueness. And you'd better be right, too -- because otherwise, you can forget about getting a date to the CMS prom.