Thoughts while building
I launched OpenFreeMap on HN exactly a month ago. Well, it's not exactly correct, as I first submitted it to HN 5 days before, when absolutely nothing happened (1). The second time it became the 12th most successful Show HN of 2024 (until today), with 848 points!
What did I change during those 5 days? I went on Reddit and launched it on r/selfhosted, r/opensource, and r/webdev, each time iterating on the title and the description.
The great thing about Reddit was that it allowed me to interact with the community; some users even started a chat. It helped me realize what the important values of my project were - the self-hosting and open-source nature - while the free part isn't really special.
Which is strange, as the technically challenging part of this project is to offer free tile-hosting for public usage, but I guess developers are fed up with "free" projects - and I totally understand them.
I was worried about launching an open-source project, and I was especially worried about HN, a famous place where projects are torn to pieces and criticized harshly. To my biggest surprise, I got the total opposite on both Reddit and HN: very supportive and helpful comments!
