My project is very fresh open source project and i am the only one mantainer with no contributors and I don’t know how to get more contributors
https://www.repowave.space/
if you guys have ideas feel free to share
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Promote your project. Here are some ideas to start with:
- Give a talk about it a FOSSUnited meetup or any other meetup, to college students who might find it useful.
- Write blog posts on it, publish it and share it in forums - hackernews, linkedin, x.com etc
Also, beware of the fine line of thread between promoting and spamming.
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What project is that?
Code contributions usually start when developers start using your FOSS projects. Otherwise, the other forms of contributions you typically observe with FOSS are advocacy (where passionate users of your software wax-lyrical about it), bug reports (where disgruntled users give you grief, or where well-meaning do quality assurance), sponsorship (monetary or flimsical like GitHub stars).
In almost all contexts, no contributors is less maintainance as a lead. Indeed some FOSS projects restrict external contributions (like Google Tink and SQLite) for the “advantages” having no external input brings. In fact, forks happen precisely on disagreements on collaboration including code contributions, as in the case of Apple WebKit WebCore & Google Blink.
Many ways to seek attention, such as spamming message boards, q&a websites, or subreddits, and leaving links to game AEO+SEO, which may or may not work, but will get you banned.
That said, contribution is a byproduct of building something that’ll have a lot of users which comes from solving pressing, hair-on-the-fire needs. In practice, this usually means, folks who have their hair-on-fire (figuratively) will find a solution like yours & will start using it or poking it to adopt it (without your prompting), and eventually contribute to it, as its success solves their own burning problem. As that happens, more & more users, who are under the same heat, will find out about your solution (word of mouth marketing, as MBAs would call it) and flock to it. This is all very very gradual, unless there’s inherent network effects built-in to your solution, or you’re working on a red-hot technology that’s undergoing quadratic (or even exponential) growth (aka hype cycle). Though, if you’re building during any hype cycle (crypto, fast commerce, food tech, ai, cloud…), if you’re lucky, you’ll end up with more copycats than contributors. And if you’re not lucky, you’ll lose out to one or two other solutions that have managed to grab all the attention and hence the interia of the hype. You can see this play out, not just in software, but also in the kind of businesses hypemen (and hypewomen), who call themselves VCs, will fund quite readily.
As for FOSS projects in particular, the curve of adoption (which brings in more contributors) looks similar to software business, which are theorized to adhere to the Diffusion of Technology curve. Depending on where your project is on that curve, you’ll have to temper your expectations for the metrics you want to achieve (for whatever reason). That said, increase in number of contributors isn’t really a good metric, at all. Neither is GitHub stars.
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