Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.
Someday people might look at your project and become demotivated at their own, and the cycle continues
give space to your own creativity
This is key. One will inevitably make many different design and UX decisions vs whatever preexisting projects are out there, making one’s project more suited to at least a few contexts than anything preexisting.
In addition to being plain demotivating, looking at other stuff too early basically encourages one to just make the same decisions as others, becoming much more like just a second implementation of what already exists.
If you’re looking for original ideas… I have bad news for you
Who cares if it already exists, just make it.
Also consider the possibility when the other, more popular projects got enshittified. Now the fleeing users have an option to switch to your project. It actually happened on one of my side project. I made it because I want to try building my own version of X. It got ~2000 users, but later down the road, X got sold to a new shitty owner that waste no time to enshittify it, and my side project suddenly grow to 20,000 users overnight.
If it brings you joy, you should make the 27th implementation of neofetch in rust.
What? There’s already 26?!
<types rm -fr neofetch-turbo while drying up tears>
I can’t believe I’ve never seen rm -fr instead of rm -rf. “remove for real” is instantly my new method of deleting directories.
or you realize that the idea fundamentally wouldnt work. i wanted to build a lemmy music recognition bot until i remembered lemmy has no videos lmao
