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)
“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.