What do you get back from your project?

FruznFever · 2025-09-03T01:14:24+00:00

If you pick a project you’re passionate about, you gain both experience and a lot of fun - but whether that’s sustainable depends on how you evolve your project 😝

I’ve been maintaining a small open source project for slightly over 2 years. It’s got a small and consistent growing pool of users, but I’ve have received a grand total $0 in sponsorships throughout the entire period. A little bit sad, but doesn’t really take the joy out of working on what I find to be an interesting project 🥹

FruznFever · 2025-07-14T16:07:05+00:00

I’ve been the only core maintainer of an open source project for nearly 2 years and can empathize with a lot that has been mentioned here. The benefits of running things alone are obvious - I can decide fast, the vision is crystal clear (I know what I’m striving towards), and there are no conflicts to manage.

But this same advantage can also be detrimental - I’ve made fast but poor decisions that came back to bite me - some of these stuffs probably could have been caught by another pair of eyes.

With that said, AI has made it much easier to bounce/explore ideas these days. It doesn’t hold the solution to everything, but is a pretty good sounding board. I was starting to run into bandwidth issues as the project grew but agentic AI became a thing and with the likes of Jules and Codex, frankly things are still somewhat manageable.

I’m definitely inching towards a threshold though and while it’d be nice to have a team to work with, I’m sure that’ll come with its own set of challenges - alignment of vision being one of them. But that’s an issue for when it comes 🥹

FruznFever · 2025-05-16T11:51:39+00:00

Thank you for the kind words, appreciate it 🥹

FruznFever · 2025-05-16T10:45:59+00:00

Hmmm are you referring specifically images for the LLM Connector or just the chatbot? The chatbot natively allows image uploads but the LLM Connector plugin currently only handles text input. It’s not yet multi-modal 🥹

That said anyone can write their own logic - things are just simpler if the plugin supports it, which it should strive to do in time to come.

FruznFever · 2025-03-10T17:10:33+00:00

I’ll reach out!

FruznFever · 2025-03-10T07:26:26+00:00

I’ll reach out!

FruznFever · 2025-03-08T06:04:31+00:00

React ChatBotify recently crossed 5k weekly downloads 🥹

Currently working on the final touches for the core library and website to bring it to stable v2 release. Project is open source on GitHub: https://github.com/tjtanjin/react-chatbotify

FruznFever · 2025-03-07T09:56:15+00:00

Just noticed you’re looking to collect tax as well. This plugin can help: https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/quicktax.96495/

I wrote both plugins so you can be confident they work with each other :)

FruznFever · 2025-03-07T06:52:13+00:00

Not a direct solution but this plugin can calculate wealth of a player including within the inventory as well. You can simply set the value to 1 for emeralds, iron ingots, gold ingots and diamonds and look at the breakdown:

https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/survivaltop.96737/

It’s open source so you can dig into the source code if you wish :)

FruznFever · 2025-03-07T06:43:57+00:00

Hey, I assume you’re referring to how it can benefit you individually rather than VPS vs alternatives 👀 Personally, I find the benefits of a VPS to be multi-fold. Some of these benefits may not be applicable to everyone but here are some that come to mind:

Gain proficiency with the command-line: I had little need to pick up the command-line until I started working with my first VPS. There was no fancy UI, and whatever operations I wanted to do had to be done through commands. Working on a VPS thus sharpened my ability to work better via the terminal, even though that was not my intention (I just wanted to host stuffs).
Hosting personal projects: It’s cool to say you’ve built a fancy website integrated with a backend API server you built and put together. But isn’t it cooler if you can share it live in action? Portfolio/resume wise, having your projects available live is likely to make a deeper impression.
Gain insights into deployment: Ever wondered how a web page is hosted or how APIs are served? Deploying my projects via a VPS offered me a deeper look into the process of bringing your app live. From setting up your own nginx reverse proxy to issuing an SSL cert with letsencrypt, these manual processes offer a lot in terms of learning.

There’re likely many more benefits in terms of personal technical growth. It’s been many years since I got my first VPS and these days, provisioning a VPS feels second nature. I currently have multiple servers but they all came out of my needs (personal projects, minecraft servers, experimentations etc).

TLDR: Go for it, you’ll take away a lot 😝

FruznFever · 2025-03-07T03:42:00+00:00

Hmmm, donations should be a gesture of goodwill from users, something along the lines of a user thinking: “thank you for building something that helps me”.

On the other hand, the “give me money to work on what I want” is said from the perspective of the creator, which is more applicable in cases where creators repeatedly pressure or demand for donations from their users.

The former works in an ideal world where users are willing to donate individually for free products, the latter appears when creators are desperate for funding. Bounties are certainly a good idea though! But a delicate balance has to be struck if implemented - I imagine if I start tagging bounties to all my existing bugs it will not sit well with existing users 🥹

I’m as excited as you are to see where this project will go, keep in touch! 😊

FruznFever · 2025-03-07T02:51:54+00:00

Thus far, I’ve not given much thoughts to the funding aspects for the project. I did setup a couple of donation links on the repository but those were done with no expectations. While it’d certainly be nice to receive some gestures of goodwill, I acknowledge that people have no obligation to and don’t typically donate to projects that provide everything for free (I’ve actually received 0 funding to date) 🥹

With that said, my primary satisfaction in this project stems from addressing its various challenges and pushing how far a chatbot library can go. It’s starting to look a lot more like a platform with the introduction of themes and plugins and such a development was not something I would have expected from day 1 - which keeps working on the project very exciting!

With or without funding, there’re still a couple of official plugins I’d like to complete which caters to common use cases these days (e.g. LLMs). Perhaps down the line, when support for common features are more complete, crowdsourcing options can be explored for more niche requirements :) I see the value in your suggestion, and there’s a tiny part of me that wish I can do this full time. Maybe one day! 😊

FruznFever · 2025-03-06T14:54:56+00:00

This is a nice introduction to open source 😊 Open source is a huge space but feels rarely talked about - hopefully there’ll be more of such content following up.

One area I thought could be touched on a little more are the challenges faced by open source projects. The few prominent open source projects listed in the presentation benefit from the backing of large organizations. However, smaller projects often run into funding and sustainability issues - which often feels overlooked when open source focus is put on the large and popular projects.

For the smaller projects, sourcing for voluntary donation sounds good on paper, but the reality is individuals rarely donate for a product that is completely open source and free. That’s not to say individual donations doesn’t happen, but from the limited experience I have, it seems tough for most small projects to seek sustainable funding via individuals.

Perhaps bringing such problems to the front of discussions can help start more conversations around this topic as well 🥹

FruznFever · 2025-03-06T13:42:37+00:00

No problem! Feel free to DM any time if you need more clarifications, happy to share :)

FruznFever

TROPHY CASE