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How do people know it exists to solve their problem? Even before LLMs it was hard to get through VC funded marketing by (commercial) competitors.

My first Open Source project easily got off the ground just by being listed in SourceForge.

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Haha, have you tried that? I think in this day and age marketing is much needed activity even for open-source projects providing quality solutions to problems.
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I maintain a niche-popular project that I didn't do any marketing for. My understanding is that even for popular projects, the usual dynamic is that there's just one guy doing all the work. So "getting off the ground" just means getting people to use it, and there shouldn't be any reason to artificially force that.
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It depends what your objective is. Many people seem to see their open source projects as a stepping stone into some commercial activity. Putting aside whether that is a good idea or not if that is what they want to do then they will need to market in some way.
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