Reasons until now
Increasingly, every time a new guide is shared, people ask for a link or struggle with the image itself. I've avoided that because 1) I didn't know (and still don't) whether this would turn into anything substantial. 2) I felt Reddit, Lemmy and other communities were good enough as a platform.
Is now the right time (some stats)
It appears that there is a strong and continued interest in finding alternatives that might justify putting more time into it.
- Reddit shows 1M+ views across all posts over the last 1-2 months
- Although this will be inflated, this doesn't include other platforms such as Lemmy (no stats here), BlueSky and LinkedIn (apparently was posted there a few times)
- There has been a lot of engagement with people asking questions - 10k+ comments
- The movement was growing at about 1k per week - not bad!
- It is becoming challenging to have all the different versions up-to-date and easily accessible
Benefits of a site
- Easier to maintain the latest versions without re-posts
- Easier to navigate between guides/options
- Easier to share with others
- Most importantly, track impact!
- A common question is, "Is this even making a difference?". This way, we can track the actual monetary impact, which tools people choose, and why.
- This will help keep individuals motivated to do more and attract new people to the different causes.
Current ideas for a site
- Three tiers to compare different options
- The full guide with 3-4 per category
- A deep dive guide per category with recommendations and opinionated groupings
- A detailed table per category with features to filter and sort by
- Profile to track the impact
- Your monetary impact per month/year
- How many people have you referred, along with their impact
- What is the global community's impact to date
- It will be open-sourced and try to avoid any of the big-tech providers (where possible)
- I will sponsor the hosting and can do the full development
- It should take about ~2 weeks to get up and running
That said, I am already struggling to keep up with 2 weekly updates (a new deep-dive guide and category to the overall guide). For this to become a reality, I will need your help, great or small!
What can you do?
- Please comment on whether you would use such a website, and share any ideas.
- If anyone has experience with Vuejs (or React) and would like to contribute, that would be more than appreciated!
- If anyone has experience with Figma (or equivalent) and would like to contribute, that would be more than appreciated!
- If anyone is interested in helping with the research, please let me know. Shoutout again to u/MegSpen725, who has helped the last few weeks!
You can either DM me or comment below on any of the above.
Even if this doesn't materialise, it has been amazing to see the engagement and growth of the movement!
Personally I like your guides, I come back to this community back here because they are easy to find here as opposed to the other communities they are (cross-)posted to. I don't use Reddit, so I am missing out of the conversation there. If there would be a website, I would likely to visit it every now and then to look for information.
At the same time, there are already other websites and it might not add any benefit. Personally I think I'd would be very interested in an 'interactive' version of your guides, but would be even more happy if this was integrated in another website that is already there. Also because if such a website is maintained by a small group of like-minded enthusiasts it is much more likely to survive the test of time.
With that said, you could take a look at the sites already and maybe see what might be missing there because they don't have your ideas implemented. They might not be interested in working with you but if they are I think you should give it a go. Looking at the images I think you have a good feeling for design and if you can develop as well they might be very interested in your skills (who knows). My favourite (and the only one I know by heart) is http://buy-european.net/ (the person behind that seems very active on Lemmy too), but there are at least one or two more you could try to reach out to.
Either way, if you choose to go this way you can consider me a 'customer'.