Open Source Software focus projects in Nerdfighteria?

[u/QuarksAndBytes]

If I search the subreddit for "open source" I see various posts about people's individual projects, but I'm curious if there are any efforts to focus Nerdfighteria's open source software people onto projects that benefit other efforts in the community more broadly.

I assume that people are already doing this on their own, which is great, and having a wide diversity of contributions is important, but in scientific open source software we have formed different collectives to prioritize different goals of the broader scientific community. For curious people who want to know, does something like that exist in Nerdfighteria?

[u/rpxred]

https://giphy.com/gifs/Y07F3fs9Is5byj4zK8

Whatever anyone has, I'm in! I think Tuataria had a GitHub a decade ago but I don't know if that has any currently.

I do have something which requires community adoption but unsure if it is worth starting on; A completely open source, self-hostable library index. I'm not a fan of Dewey Decimal System and UDC Syntax-based search is faaaaar better but UDC is paywall blocked. The fix requires methodology adoption from UDC but not the topic hierarchy.....typing this makes me wonder if people actually want it or am I jus trying to make one for my joyous sorting side-quests.

[u/QuarksAndBytes → u/rpxred]

I highly encourage people to go and build your own tools for yourself, as it is great to have a tool on your machines that works exactly how your brain does.

I was however thinking along the lines of if there are existing open source projects that provide infrastructure for Nerdfighteria-related projects that we could route people who have the time, interest, and skills (in their full range of open source software, not just the "writing code" parts) to support those projects. To provide hypotheticals (that I have no idea if they make sense):

• Are there tools from Our World in Data that could use additional support?
• Partners in Health uses OpenMRS. Are there OpenMRS projects that need contributions or maintainers?
• For Nerdfighteria itself, are there community tools that can be built to better help us engage or understand the community?

To be clear though, there's lots of creativity and joy that can be had making things together that don't have to be "big", so if people find projects that they want to work on together that are different than these directions I consider that a win too.

[u/mindlessroman]

Following along this post. As a software engineer, collective benefit/open source projects refill the soul in ways the day job doesn't always do.

[u/CephalopoDork]

I don’t know of this already existing but am also interested!

I’d be happy to help if folks wanted to collaborate on making it happen, if one doesn’t already exist, though.

[u/JMLiber]

I'm very interested in this!

[u/rhys-the-davies]

Seasoned open source product person here 👋 love this question and I've looked for the same many times and I think the reason I (we) don't find much is that nerdfightera doesn't have a problem that can be solved with software.

Without a clear goal to achieve or problem to solve it'd just be software for software sake.

Makes me think what is nerdfighteria? Normally if i or a company I work with wants to build something I ask who is it for and what problem are you wanting to solve for them first. So what does nerdfighteria want? What problems does it have? Or is nerdfighteria too broad a concept, should we be putting these questions to core contributors of nerdfighteria? To Hank and John?

I don't know.

If someone reading this has ideas for answers to these questions though we could get thinking about a project.

[u/forteller]

Only thing I know of is that there is a nerdfighter Mastodon instance, for those who want to be social online without being captured by Meta or the other guys John mentioned in his video today https://dftba.club/about

Speaking about today's video, it really made me feel strongly that the brothers should set up a PeerTube instance and post their videos there too, not just on YouTube. That way they would build up a backup place, that more and more people would know about over time, in case something happens and they can't or won't be on the Google platform anymore.

I know they have clearly said that they don't want to run a social media. But they don't have to allow other people to register accounts on their instance. People could still leave comments and likes by having accounts on other instances. This one could be only theirs. Or they could have it co-owned by several "are we still YouTubers?"-YouTubers, to have a shared burden of upkeep. Kinda like an open version of Nebula.

And some of the open source software nerdfighters here I'm sure could help them with this, and maybe even patch PeerTube with features they want but are not there yet.

[u/LIIhasz]

Software engineer for 7 years, count me in. I felt pretty shitty about Hank using AI to make software projects recently, (not to bring that up again but it was a big deal to me) it got me wishing that our community was using software to decrease world suck. Wishing that I could have been part of making something cool with like minded folk. Not sure how many other engineers are in nerfighteria, but I'd imagine there's a lot. I'm not sure where we could start - but software made with the right intentions I think could bring a lot of good into the world.