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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

UnfinishedProjects.net

looking for members to sign up and start some discussions to help us grow.

Is it compatible with Lemmy so that I can participate without creating an account?

It is not federated. AFAIS

It is federated.

You can, for example, access the announcements topic: !announcements@forum.unfinishedprojects.net

That's cool but it doesn't load for me. Does the instance have to be registered somewhere?

I can't seem to add that on the instance I'm using.

When I try to manually do the webfinger lookup, I get 403 Forbidden from Cloudflare.

It might take a few seconds before the community is fetched by your platform, I don't know how mbin does it, so you'll have to look that up for more details.

It worked for me. I can access it.

Nope. It takes a while after you first initiate a fetch of a new community. Check back later I guess.

It worked for me last time.

I like the name, and I’ve got lots of projects in various states that I’d love to share. I’ll check it out.

No, what I meant was, I tried to investigate why it doesn't work, by doing the request myself. Webfinger is the endpoint used by instances to resolve a name@domain.tld address to an actual URL. And when I tried requesting that, I got a 403 Forbidden error from Cloudflare. Still getting the same result (both manually and on the instance, there's still nothing there too).

Looking into it further, it seems Cloudflare presented me with a Javascript challenge. Which won't work without a browser. That's why it didn't work for my manual attempts, but federation would trip up there too unless the server was running Electron. Which makes no sense for a backend.

I'm not sure if this is why it didn't work for the instance I'm using of course. It working for you suggests not everyone gets the challenge. But it is a likely reason it doesn't work for some of us. In the first place, this kind of anti automated access protection makes no sense on endpoints specifically meant to be accessed in an automated manner.

@UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zip can you exclude cloudflare from all .well-known and federation endpoints? It's causing problems with federation.

Struggling with my instance as well. If you could be more specific about the webfinger tests you're doing, others could also try and replicate

Sorry, just saw this reply. Thanks for registering :)

As our current number of members are low, it would be helpful if you have some stuff to share, or stop by the introduction category and introduce yourself! Hope to see you over there if not already.

Thanks for the interest! As I mentioned on one of the other comments, our community is still small so if you are able to share or get involved it would greatly help build engagement for other members as well. Hope to see you over there :)

@UnfinishedProjects@piefed.zip See this thread, you need to get Cloudflare sorted on your federation endpoints.