There is a popular fiction that if you have a good project, a community automatically forms around it and gives it the publicity it deserves. In reality, it varies. It’s more than possible to have a lot of publicity without any project at all, as we see with a lot of startups that turn out to be vaporware. They get their publicity by talking about the supposed product everywhere.
The reality is that good projects also get their publicity… by talking about their project everywhere. The more you talk about it, the more visible you are. In CatB, Eric Raymond admits that he “grew his beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted him about fetchmail”—a practice that looks borderline spammy.
Getting heard and getting talked about takes work: work that distracts you from writing code, that involves writing low-content updates between big events in the project development and doing similar things that don’t exactly fit the idealized programmer narrative.
We cannot ignore the fact that people do judge projects by their formal popularity metrics, at least initially. We have been judged by those metrics multiple times and asked why they are so low.
Thus, we freely admit: we are grateful to everyone who subscribes to our social media feeds, stars our repos on GitHub, supports us on Patreon or BuyMeaCoffee—not only because that shows us that you are interested in the project, but also because you increase our superficial credibility metrics. In a world where projects have to compete for people’s attention, that is a valuable contribution. Giving a project a GitHub star or a $1/month Patreon subscription may not do much for the project by itself, but it may help someone who has more time or opportunities to make bigger contributions to discover the project they didn’t know about yet.
Of course, we are most grateful to people who help us make big improvements to the code, edit the docs, write detailed blog posts about VyOS, support other users at forums and slack channels, or convince their company’s management to get LTS subscriptions and support, but we don’t view small contributions as insignificant. We are grateful to everyone who participates!
Let’s see how the Patreon and BMC have grown so far.
Yesterday we’ve got our 52th Patron (not sure why it shows 55, maybe it just knows the future). We are always glad to see people show their support, and fifty people feel like a big milestone.
Also yesterday, on BMC we got 15 members, so the totals look even better!
We are going start sending VyOS logo stickers to all supporters, as we already mentioned on Patreon and BMC. But wait, there's more!
We are preparing special gifts for long term supporters. It will take a bit of time to organize, I'm sure you will like them.
Remember, all donations go towards VyOS foundation, a non-profit organization that will serve the VyOS open source project. These funds will be used for bounty programs and feature development incentives and sponsoring community devs.
Please consider supporting our effort!
Now let’s see what our social media look like:
That's our oldest social media channel with 1950 subscribers here at https://twitter.com/vyos_dev
That channel is younger than our Twitter account and has 1307 likes at https://www.facebook.com/vyosofficial
Along with Reddit, our LinkedIn page was created much later and it's one of most fastest growing social media accounts with 746 followers here at https://www.linkedin.com/company/vyos
Created more or less at the same time as the Linkedin group, grows just as fast and now has 786 members at https://www.reddit.com/r/vyos
We are glad to see the community growing. The more people are spreading awareness of VyOS, the more people can discover it, make use of it, and join the efforts.
Thanks everyone for participating and making the future of VyOS bright!
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