I'm referring to
xkcd 2347, the case where a small and oftentimes hobbyist project end up being fundamental to an entire sector
This obviously happens a lot in FOSS, but I'm wondering if this happens to, say, your personal hobbies or things that matter to you?
Asking because this has just happened to one of my hobbies two days ago. The maintainer of a very important web server for the entire community suddenly announced on X that they would shut down the server on May 31 Japanese time. Since the web server was so important, the community has already organized and nearly completed an organized web scrape of the entire server, less than 36 hours from when the news was announced (and 1-2 days before it would have been shut down)
29 May 2026 11:25
yup, i have a vue 2 project that was using a UI-component library maintained by a single person, and i needed to migrate the project to vue 3, that person didn't have the resources to do it soon enough and i had to rewrite most of my app to switch to another UI-library, i chose this time one that's maintained by a large team instead
29 May 2026 11:28
I’m into home distilling and there’s some guy called Alex who posted under Bokakob and designed a still back in 2001 and posted it on homedistiller.org. That design is still in use today and nobody really knows much about that guy or heard from him much since.
29 May 2026 12:03
I think most hobbies have a few legends of the hobby.
I recently got into learning about foraging. There's is one dude is Wisconsin who basically wrote "The Book" on foraging.
Samuel Thayer has basically rewrote what is and isn't edible. He tried all the old sources himself as well as doing checking ethnobotany sources and asking people native to the region about every plant. He's got three books and the ultimate field guide. All his books and titles are the source of the new AI slop foraging books out there.
29 May 2026 14:57
For larp, no. It's a hobby pretty much defined by everyone reinventing the wheel constantly.
For reenactment/experimental archeology? There are definitely authoritative works, but those are mostly by professional, traditional historians. There are remarkably few books on how to, say, bend an early medieval hedge, or how thick your daub needs to be or how old Madder should be to get the best colours.
29 May 2026 16:49
"bus factor" I believe it's called. How many people have to be hit by a bus to crash the project. As for stuff I've experienced. Ham radio overlaps a fair bit with FOSS, so there's that. Last year there was an argument between the team developing a new digital voice protocol (M17) and the guy who develops the most popular modem for digital voice (MMDVM). I had a raspberry pi with an MMDVM hat whose SD card had corrupted, and I couldn't be bothered to fix it until a few weeks ago. When it went down it could do M17, and when I brought it back up it couldn't. That's how I found out.
29 May 2026 19:15
CURL is kinda like that. Its in a better place now but hes still getting a bit
burnt out .
29 May 2026 19:24
Oh yeah also piefed only has a couple of devs on the entire project. A lot of open source is like that actually (kinda like xkcd is calling out in your example). Its crazy how much software we use is made by a VERY small subset of people.
29 May 2026 19:36
So I have finally started seeing some viable replacements, _after_ a several weeks long partial outage due to changing infrastructure at GitHub, but for years now, the custom keyboard design community has relied on a single person’s site,
https://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/ , to design keyboard layouts, _and_ to generate properly labeled json exports to set up the most popular firmware.
30 May 2026 00:41
There seem to be very few people who are willing and able to properly organise large-scale re-enactment events. In my country, like half of the scene is dependant on one guy who more-or-less makes a living of organising events.
30 May 2026 03:01
Julian's Thing
It's a tool for spot feeding coral. Just a syringe with a long tube and plunger but for its purpose it is fantastic. I have not found an origin for the devicr but assume someone named Julian put the first one together.
30 May 2026 21:37
Yeah, I feel like that comic is super relatable to `curl`. Given Dan founded it and is still to this day one of the main developers
30 May 2026 23:08
Bill Booth
If it wasn't for Bill, modern skydiving would not exist. It's not just the 3 ring release, but several of his innovations that brought jumping out of an airplane out of the dark ages. His "Vector" line of containers is the best in the business. My student jumps were on rip cord equipped containers, but once of student status I exclusively jumped BOC throw out PC's. Bottom Of Container Pilot Chute. This is how the main parachute is deployed by the jumper.
Does modern skydiving require his ongoing developments? Probably not, but the very foundation of skydiving was laid down by him. I would not have my 4500 jumps if it were not for him.
1 Jun 2026 22:18
Lemmy
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