We started out making Slack and Discord Google searchable and search engine friendly see: kotlin for example https://slack-chats.kotlinlang.org/ they have around 50,000 pages indexed by Google. We render a static version for Google while giving you the real time experience of a chat app.
Secondly most large communities end up being a community support channel. So for anyone with customer support experience having your conversation in one place is really crucial as well as some sort of open close state. I was also the author for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups which made me a bit opinionated in terms of community/customer support
Finally most communities end up being too noisy and in part is because it is designed for chat. I actually don't think there is a great solution out there to manage conversations at a large scale and we think we can innovate on the UX of it.
The ones that have a bit more sponsorships tend to offer some sort of priority support. But even that is very difficult.
I also maintain an open source project with 4k stars but we didn’t even bother with the sponsorship path and decided to monetize by charging for a hosted version.
For reference https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups
We're a live message tool and it is basically what Elixir is built for https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups.
The Elixir community has been great and incredibly friendly. I originally was worried about the size of the community but that hasn't been an issue the community has been super helpful. I also think the annual stackoverflow usage surveys are very misleading because most of the community's questions get asked in ElixirForum and not on Stackoverflow.
Phoneix is the web framework of Elixir which is very similar to Rails but minus a lot of the magic has been very helpful for our productivity as well.
If I had to built another service that is websocket heavy I would definitely use Elixir. Even if it was a standard crud app I would still most likely choose Elixir.
For our open source project (https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups). We participated in hacktoberfest recently and one problem we ran into is people submitting low quality PRs. Which ends up taking up way more time to review than to merge.
I would love to be able to filter by users who have merged multiple issues or some sort of quality bar for our bounties. Obviously since you are just starting out your users won't have too many issues merged. You might be able to work around this by finding the number of Github issues an author have merged previously to any projects that is greater than x number of stars. This way you might be able to bootstrap some credibility of the authors. Then a open source maintainer can gate on only allowing some reputable contributors.
One inspiration I would recommend is taking a look at how 99designs has different tiers of designers you can have a bounty for your design. If you could build 99design for open project that would be amazing. Best of Luck!
We launched on August and have been steadily getting some traction and building a little community in our Slack channel
Like Chatwoot, we're open source and have a free tier on our hosted version for anyone who'd like to give us a try!
Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2].
Here's the repo [0], website [1], and demo [2] for anyone who wants to check us out!
Storytime is built on top of the amazing rrweb [2] library, which captures snapshots of DOM mutations and streams them over a secure Phoenix channel (websocket over wss) [3] to a page in our dashboard.
It doesn't persist any of this data, and the streaming only starts when you trigger it (so your website isn't constantly streaming these events through a websocket unnecessarily). And since we're open source, if you're concerned about privacy, you can always just host it on premise :)
Would love any feedback!
[0] https://github.com/papercups-io/storytime
[1] https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups