Show HN: I built a platform for projects to find maintainers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a platform for projects to find maintainers

seeking-maintainers.net

49 pointsgarritfra9 comments

A few days ago, someone I follow asked the community for help maintaining his side-project, 512kb.club. This got me thinking.

There are loads of maintainers out there feeling burnt out, but they can't abandon their project since people are depending on the project to be maintained.

In an effort to combat this, I built a website that lists projects looking for new maintainers. It's still quite empty and has some rough edges. Any feedback is very welcome!

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> There are loads of maintainers out there feeling burnt out, but they can't abandon their project since people are depending on the project to be maintained.

I think we need to change the expectation here. If the maintainer is doing so with their free time and is not being compensated, it's perfectly fine for them to take a break, reduce support, or stop altogether. I hope maintainers know that.

There's also Adoptoposs [1] which basically serves the same purpose.

[1] https://adoptoposs.org/

Are you looking for a maintainer for seeking-maintainers.net?

Sorry, just kidding, couldn't help myself...

You joke, but that has happened to similar platforms in the past; unmaintained-free-software.org was a wiki performing a similar function, but it became unmaintained and shut down.

I wonder if this blockchain thing could be a solution to this problem. Having that DAO thing taking care of these projects. Users buy tokens to fund the project and provide input. I don't know, the idea occurred to me now...

It's a bit frustrating that we can't even solve lack of maintenance on projects that aim to solve... lack of maintenance!

Its kind of inevitable that things become unmaintained; everyone has different interests and priorities that evolve over time as people change jobs, start a family etc.

Baked[1]: Code Shelter <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199647>

1. https://www.halfbakery.com/editorial/help.html#mfd

GitHub already tracks the topic: https://github.com/topics/maintainer-wanted

Might be easier if someone could curate the topic on the GitHub Explore page instead: https://github.com/github/explore/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

Perhaps some conventions around a main issue or the README linking to the relevant issue (with the repository being labelled)

Thanks for the hint! This can probably be integrated quite well into the site.

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