Growing a community for an open source software
What are tips and tricks to grow a community around an open source software. In particular, my software is not released yet. There is really no easy way to try it, I am working on it.
How can reach more potential users and maybe developers?
Here is what I am already doing:
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blogging on my personal blog (around 50 unique visitors per day)
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I post updates on github, linkedin, twitter and mastodon (around 150 followers)
I read Social Architecture. The take away is that I need to grow a community. But it is not clear from the book how it must happen. To me, the book mostly deals with existing usable software and not the bootstrap phase.
I also tried to write a paper, but that is not only time consuming but also difficult.
One thing I want to try is to open a discourse forum.
Any ideas how I can reach more people without using ads?
What problem will your software solve?
If you can find people who have that problem, write content that appeals to them, and start to become a thought leader in that space, you'll be able to cultivate a community. Once your software is complete, you can offer it to that community and solve their problem.
For example, if you built open source book publishing software, you could start joining communities of self published authors, writing blog posts about self publishing, and publish your own book on several platforms to showcase the pros and cons. Once you release your new publishing platform, you can write about how it's better and all the problems it addresses.
That is somewhat already what I am doing. I subscribed to several mailing list and try to participate to the conversation without forcing my project into the conversation.
Who is showing interesting in what you are doing now? And how can you start creating conversations and relationships with them?
If no one is showing interest, where can you find people who might be interested? Are there Twitter conversations you can participate in? Any forums or threads that you can get involved with? Not necessarily about promoting your product, but more about trying to have those real conversations.
Can you reach out personally to the people who may follow you already and start a real conversation?
Thanks for responding.
I tried in the past but it did not work. I will retry with my new followers.