If you are thinking about transitioning an organization to open source, pricing and vendor lock-in are generally good arguments.

If you are thinking about helping individuals transition, that’s a bit more difficult. Pricing could still work, but is not always that effective. It boils down to the willingness to try something new.

In both cases projects with good documentation and a healthy community also helps, but if the open alternative lacks features, it’s a though sell.

I am not concerned about not having anything to show for my free time. I am just not finding interest doing stuff which could indicate something worse.

You are not alone. It’s not easy to find an engaging free time activity. And even if you do, you may get bored of it after some time. The only thing I can say is: even if something doesn’t seem very interesting at first, give it a try anyway (as long as it doesn’t require a huge upfront investment). You may end up liking the activity or you may end up with like-minded people. And the worst case scenario is, you have wasted some time.

I think majority of people suffer from not having a meaningful free time activity (amplified by the possibilities of internet). And I’m saying this without any data to back it up, so don’t quote me on that.

Not having any personal projects is perfectly fine. Don’t worry about it. Not everyone has to have their job as their hobby. Try other things (music, hiking, cooking, etc.). Try to find a hobby that makes you happy (if you don’t already have one). That’s way more important than having a public GitHub profile. And if a company decided not to hire you because of that, you basically dodged a bullet.

I know you said “self hosted”, but if you are interested in an Android app, Google Play Books does most of what you want, I think. You can upload your books, and read them on any device (with offline capabilities). But this is the Self Hosted community, so I will show myself out.

I don’t follow it very closely, but as far as I know, they are the only one implementing the open protocol they designed (which doesn’t interoperate with ActivityPub). However, there seems to be some efforts for creating a bridge: https://www.docs.bsky.app/blog/feature-bridgyfed

As you said, there are some recognizable faces and that may impact the adoption. But not being compatible with ActivityPub is a real bummer.

The first time I saw that prompt, I thought the same. “I don’t want to cancel the install, I want to install it.” You get used to it, but I don’t think this is a very good UX.

That’s a heroic effort! I laughed so hard.

I think I will quit at this point.

Thank you for the response. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that this is not an easy task. If I understand the documentation correctly, that means, I will have to create a C# wrapper for C++ methods. I was hoping to get the wrapping for free via some tooling. I found Emscripten that looks promising (for JS), but not sure that’s any different.