Show HN: Connect a GitHub repo, get a community for your OSS project | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Connect a GitHub repo, get a community for your OSS project

earde.com

1 pointtolarianwiz4 comments

Hi HN, I built Earde because none of the community tools I was using felt like it was designed for open-source projects.

Discord is good for realtime chat, Discourse and Zulip are better for things that should be preserved, but I kept wanting one place that did both and was actually tied to the project itself.

So on Earde you connect a public GitHub repo and get:

-live chat -a public forum indexed by search engines -turning useful chat conversations into permanent forum threads -connections between related project communities, so the same discussion can be shared between them in one click -usable directly in the browser -one feed for all the project communities you follow

I know you can approximate most of these things by combining existing tools, the experiment here is whether they make more sense as one thing, specifically for OSS projects.

It's still very early, so I'm interested in what feels wrong or missing, especially from maintainers who already have a Discord/Zulip/Discourse/etc. for their project.

You can browse the app without creating an account here: https://www.earde.com/feed And here's a demo of a public technical thread shared between communities: https://www.earde.com/c/northstar/t/116-client-enters-a-reco...

really nice idea, in past I have had problems to find people who would like to contribute to my project, or even now its hard to find projects that resonate with me, since github search got so worse

Thanks! Yeah, I think project/contributor discovery are closely related to this, but I haven't built that part yet since I want to get the basic community model right first. One reason I wanted communities to be tied to repos is that, over time, you get a much better signal than stars alone. Out of curiosity, was the bigger problem for you finding contributors for your own project, or finding interesting projects to contribute to?

Kinda both, there are so many projects that I care about and I could contribute too, but the hardest part is just getting your first few contributions, or finding a project where community is now that big enough, so you can reach out to people directly, instead of just being a 'contributor'

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