A few of us have put together a forum and wiki in the hopes to build a community focused on collaboration for various open source and creative commons projects. We build the platform a few months ago, but haven’t done the greatest job of actually spreading the word and building up the active members, so I’m posting in another attempt to try and spread the word to establish some activity for our community.
In short, the idea behind our website is to:
- Build a community that is based on genuine connections and collaboration. Our community is a forum and wiki, and hopes to steer towards a slower (and possibly more old school) type of internet - and away from some communities that are mostly article reposts and memes.
- Libre/foss/creative commons/etc - we want to help generate community that can come together to work on projects that benefit everyone, and in a way, push back against some of the urges of capitalism.
- Involvement - we want to welcome everyone, but the idea is to eventually create a culture where people are not afraid to contribute small things to many projects. We want to motivate individuals to grow the foss ecosystem without feeling like they need to commit heavily to any one project. Projects can get rekindled and improved on even if others have abandoned it.
Overall, we have a big vision for the community - but at this point we are just trying to get it off the ground and are looking for members to sign up and start some discussions to help us grow.
The goal is to create a community that is able to stand on its own, and outlast myself or any of the other admins. And essentially become a commons space, with the current admins simply acting as a steward that can be replaced if they need/want to step down. In that respect, we hope to get some members and allow the community to grow and evolve the platform to fit the needs of the community.
While modern social media has its place, we felt that the current standing of online collaborative spaces were limiting and often highly niche. We hope that maybe we can grow a space for people of various skills, backgrounds, and ideas can come together to create a creative and productive space - and make some lasting connections as well.
I know this post got a bit lengthy, and many will probably skim over it, but if it’s something that sounds interesting to you I would really appreciate it if you came over and checked it out, signed up, and maybe help us get some discussions going to help us grow our community. And of course, if you would be so kind as to helping us spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated - as we spent so much time working on building the site, but none of us are all that great at actually “marketing” the community to actually find new members.
Our forum is: forum.UnfinishedProjects.net
And our wiki, where we hope people will actually build out various projects together is located at:
Do not upload copyrighted material — images, audio, code, or text.
So this is entirely for public domain work, not copyleft? No attribution?
Who controls the systems the group operates on? You said you were one of the admins, so presumably there’s a tier of users with some level of control over the group? How are the contributors organized, in general?
Read here for a more detailed writeup: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics
But essentially we actually heavily encourage copyleft licensing. Copyright is different then copyleft (at least from my understanding - but maybe I need to reword the sentence you quoted?)
Pretty much any type of “open” license is allowed except for CC-ND, because “no derivitive” sort of kills the spirit of our collaborative nature of allowing our projects to grow and evolve.
As for who controls the system, read more here: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Vision
In short, I “own” the VPS, but I am trying my best to make the platform belong to the community, while I simply act as a steward of the commons. I back up nonsensitive data publicly to Codeberg, and share actual backups with other admins. The goal is to have the community outlast any one individual. If anyone ever wants to, they can essentially copy the platform to a new VPS and Domain, and continue the platforms operations.
In practice, there may be a few hurdles as I am inexperienced and still learning - but hopefully the systems and operations will evolve with th community if successful. I want the platform to be a commons, not “belonging” to anyone - but stewards that may come and go. Outlasting me or any other admins. The goal is to diversify control and decision making as much as possible, allowing the community to self regulate/govern, but obviously in these early stages we can’t do that without members.
Hope that answers your questions, and we are always open to feedback. It’s tough getting a community off the ground, and we are just a couple of individuals who are passionate about the idea.
But essentially we actually heavily encourage copyleft licensing. Copyright is different then copyleft (at least from my understanding - but maybe I need to reword the sentence you quoted?)
“Copyleft licenses” all rely on the legal framework of copyright to function. So you can’t have say, the GPL or the MIT licenses without the legal framework for copyright. Or at least, you can’t enforce the terms of the licenses legally.
Yeah that makes sense. I will likely need to adjust the wording of the site then, to ensure it is clear the intentions. Thank you for the feedback :)
I’ll add it to my to-do list :)
A standalone forum is an interesting choice in 2026 when ActivityPub forum software exists.
Looks like there is a Piefed and Lemmy.world community too.
It is a “standalone forum” but it also is integrated into the fediverse (nodeBB).
I stand corrected! Thanks for pointing that out.
Will you be allowing LLM code?
For a more detailed writeup on our current views: https://unfinishedprojects.net/wiki/About/Ethics
But in short, we don’t want to dictate the parameters for eacy project, and want each project to set their own requirements. We do have a “notice”/“banner” on the wiki that we ask people to utilize for each project to be clear and transparent about their requirements for AI/LLM use.
People, get your ideas posted there already! I’ve already put mine no matter how shabby they were. Even if you do not plan to continue with your project, it is a great idea to share it with other people for reference and inspiration.
