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)
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.