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

[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.

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.