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)
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.