May 2024: Focusing on projects

Hi. I'd like to express some concerns I had for years about handmade.network. They are not going to be well presented as I struggle to do that in part because they're about my experience and I figure that probably not many people perceive things the same way so I'm always hesitant to just write them down, and I know that I will just end up deleting 3 quarter of what I wrote in the end.

The site feels dead. It seems that everything is on the Discord server. I've never liked Discord as a forum. I use it a lot for voice comms, and as a small forum for friends, but as a forum for big communities it fails in my opinion. I should probably try harder but something doesn't click for me.

There seems to be less and less people here. Except for 1 or two project creators, projects don't get updates, their sub forums are empty and several times I told newcomer to just go ask their questions or discord if they want any answer (there are no mail notification on the site, which I think most people expect). Which leads to "what's the point of the site ?". Don't get me wrong, Here, is the only place I ask questions and expect to get good answer by competent people I "know". And I don't want to loose that. But what's the point of people having projects here, if they just create the page and then forget about it ? I'm expecting that several creator just didn't get much from the project page, except a redirection to their site/discord/other.

Could the site do more than just host a small page with a few links ? I don't know if it's the same on discord, but getting any feedback on a project seems to be very hard. Just asking for "Does it even start ?" seems to be asking too much. Which is disappointing in my opinion. I would expect that out of the 7000 members at least a few would reply.

I understand that the way I would like things to be is "old" (not following trends, going against the flow), and that most people are happy with discord and how things go in that direction. I'm not asking for people to change (in any way), I'm the one that need to adapt to the new way or not change and accept the "consequence".

But some things could be better on the site. For example the learning jam was never announced in a blog post. It's the first time I heard about Unwind. The post jams streams were never announced on the site, and I don't know if the recordings were linked on the site. For some jams there were "recap" blog posts, but I don't think it was the case for most of them. A some point there was talk about "thought out conversations" on a particular topic (was that "Fishbowl" ?) and I thought, when it was announced, isn't that the perfect things to have on a forum so that it's accessible to the world to read afterward ?

My point here is to say, that for the site to feel alive it needs to be fed, that some part of the community (me ?) won't be on discord (or have the server muted because there is a lot of "noise") and that we could keep them up to date with what's happening in the network. I know that writing blog post is time consuming (like taking 2 hours to write a comment on a blog post) and if I'm the only person that would like to be kept up to date, than it's not worth anybody's time and effort.

But in that case, it's probably not worth the effort of making the nth version of the site (with each versions never finished), and we could simplify it to just a Join Discord button and keep the forum for a while.

I feel bad for writing all that. This community help me grow a lot as a programmer, and I can't thank you all enough. But at the same time, I feel like it has moved in a different direction that I'd have liked and wanted to express that.

Thank you for reading.

Random thoughts about discord:

• You can't search discord from the web. There is probably plenty of valuable information that's in there, but people that are not aware of the network won't be able to find them.
• Let's hope Microsoft (or similar) doesn't buy Discord.
• Let's hope Discord doesn't do something stupid.

You are not the only one feeling like that, i'm also having similar thought about the main site and the discord server (and i've seen people express similar feelings here and there over the years).

I hope the new website will go in the direction you are talking about, and will try to make it more lively. Most of the times, if i don't open discord i'll miss out on great events and projects, it's such a shame. Focusing on the projects and discussions around that might be a good thing for the site, so i'm happy to see where this goes... hopefully not only on discord.

In my opinion, discord being VERY hard to search is a also a big problem since communication and access to information is such a big part of what makes handmade.network (for me). Even if we have ways to archive /export stuff from discord, it's just a hack around the root problem.

I am very much looking forward to this year jams though :)

You two are not as alone as you think. Over in Handmade Cities we have fans of the conferences and meetups who will not touch Discord even if you paid them. Often it's not just any fan, but important contributors to the movement.

It feels very lonely at the moment, especially since the majority have chosen convenience over everything else. (Even I was forced to make concessions, as Ben mentioned at the end.)

Let's bear with Ben and the admin team: they seem serious about bringing the website back to life. For it to succeed though, it does seem like it needs to move away from traditional forums.

The new website design is indeed designed to make the site much more lively. There's so much good work happening on the Discord, but this site currently just doesn't reflect it, and that's what we want to change.

Overall, here are the changes we're making to the site right now:

• Designing the site around a feed of updates, like what you see today on user profiles and project pages.
• Adding the ability to follow users and projects so you can create your own personalized feed.
• Overhauling the appearance and editing experience for projects.

And other things we're thinking of adding in the future include an external RSS integration for projects, personal blog posts, and potentially even mirroring the Discord #help content to the website to address the concern about Discord not being searchable. If you join me for my Twitch streams I'd be happy to walk through the designs and discuss more of the ideas we have in store.

Nice to know I'm not alone.

Just wanted to support mrmixer in what they were saying, I'm not a big fan of discord (mainly it just eats up a lot of time and pulls you back to "just check" which I don't like). I find the project showcase feed on the website from the discord my favourite part of the site.

My favourite parts in past of the site were more indepth blog articles of peoples projects that had a large educational chunk in them for example Chen's 'Monter' blog posts.

Thanks for all the hard work by Ben, Abner and team

This is an additional idea that could be added to the new site. Instead of having specific educational material, could there be a roadmap to become a 'handmade' developer? For example there are multiple streams like: games, web, language design, security, general user software (text editors, disk mappers, etc). And within these streams a roadmap is provided based around projects. So for games it's like: text adventure game -> pong -> asteroids -> 2d platformer -> doom clone -> Minecraft clone -> 3d game -> networked games. For web it's like basic HTML page -> website with server -> writing your own server in C or Go.

Something like this at each stage with multiple variations you could choose, and different side quests. And each stage has a list of things you should learn.

Then people could post their projects referencing what stage their currently completing & you can follow people and get their updates in your feed. Then when you complete a stream you get a certified badge for that stream.

Instead of writing full learning materials, this is a more low effort way of providing some educational structure. And experts can easily give advice without big time commitments of writing actually learning materials. Just what type of projects would be a good fit at that stage.