Ara - a social media to make sustainable open-source

⚙️ Technology and Open Source
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Happy 2026 year!

In the november, 2025, I posted “What do you think about CascadeFund“ here in the Sustainoss forum. CascadeFund was a donation platform in a gamified way. After the feedbacks and criticism, I rebranded it as "Ara” that was improving the CascadeFund’s idea. But also, Ara was the intial name originally. :slight_smile:

What is CascadeFund → Ara now?

It’s like a social media layer on top of the git repository. It adds issues, roadmaps and versions. But asks projects to turn into community owned projects over time. All to make the software to live, when maintainer abandones it. While maintainer himself gets recognition, to be next Linus Torvalds or even more famous like Steve Jobs, known to non-techy people as the open-source guru.

Right now, gathering the feedbacks, and honest brutal review, if you can. So, join in in any way, as you suggest.

Demo Video showing core features: https://youtu.be/daBZkiKarI8?si=hVKQOIGozws4Jwvw

App Website: https://ara.foundation/

Cheers, and happy new year!

1 Like
What do you think about CascadeFund (my project, but only landing page)
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I don’t understand it from first impression. I get this much:

  • blockchain is used to track issues and resolutions and credit for resolving issues
  • dependencies are tracked in order to have donations shared upstream
  • there’s an attractive UI and some gamified stuff with terms like sunshine and galaxies

I don’t get:

  • how the sharing is calculated
  • how popularity relates to the need for funding (some popular projects are trivial, some really need a lot of maintenance etc)
  • how the system relates to payment processing (are payments all in tokens?)

Charitably, I understand the idea as aiming to resolve the dilemma of funding that shows up downstream getting sent upstream. I don’t understand whether you believe that this system makes any important change to motivate donations to be made in the first place, and if so how/why.

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For now sharing is split equally.

For popularity both ara and maintainer himself help to make it more popular.

For payments, it’s a third party payment gateways that support fiat on-ramp. They will send directly to users. And for it will use stable coins only. No project tokens.

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So, do I understand your view right? The supposed reason that donors would be more interested in using this is because donors don’t like worrying about whether projects are supporting their upstream dependencies and might like blockchain guaranteeing the sharing?

I’m not convinced that distrust about ecosystem resource sharing is something that makes donors less likely to donate. And I think the main challenge to achieving sustainable open-source is about getting more people comfortable donating — not as much about figuring out how to distribute funds that people are already willing to donate.

I hope that’s clear. To restate, I think we need to look at the question, “why do so many potential donors hesitate to donate?” and that is where sustainability gets solved. I don’t think stable coins or optimal sharing with upstream dependencies or gamified fun are adequate answers to the question. I think the dilemma is primarily in people hesitating to donate unilaterally when we all really wish that others would donate more…

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Yes, the main challenge is to make people comfortable with donating. So any open-source project who agree to receive a donor, sets the cap of donations (tracked on blockchain for transparency, but here its just a tech). Once that cap donor is received, the project goes to the donors. But not for donation, as pay-to -own. Instead turns into gamified collaboration, so that maintainer and users collaborate on the project and share the token.

So, idea is user donates, and owns the project. How its used, depends on the project, and its size. But for example, users could get the tokens and stake in the API, so it never gets deprecation in the future versions.

Wasn’t it clear on the main website? All people are saying that idea isn’t clear there.

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I did not find the main website clear enough that I just got it right away, nor do I even really think I get it now.

Some of your language here reinforces my impression that English is not your native language. Your English is far better than my capacity with any non-native language — I’m just saying that bits of this are slightly hard to follow in the context of the whole set of new ideas also.

I imagine “owns” here refers to a status determined within the gamified blockchain system. In open-source in general, “owned” is not the language commonly used because so much less of the capacities with a project are exclusive to anyone.

I’m now getting the impression of an attempt to push investment / ownership-stake / financialization which works for proprietary software into a context where it could work for open-source.

I think that open-source sustainability has to be focused on aligning the incentives of the participants with what is healthy for the public goals of the project. So, someone expecting a financial return or someone interested in some side add-on of gamification has incentives that are not necessarily aligned with (likely in conflict with) the public goal of dynamic, free/libre/open technology that is well-maintained while minimizing the problems that come from anyone having special exclusive rights or control.

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I apologize for my English. It’s that I was focused too much on technical side. Now re-learning how to write proper complete sentences. :slight_smile:

By ”Own”, I meant a copyright ownership, including the license change from whats in the repository. It’s when the maintainers and contributors agree to give the right to the code they wrote to the project token holders. It doesn’t mean that token holders make it private, or prevent its forks.

In fact, i want to encourage the forks, but in Ara, the forks are linked through the issues. It makes them discoverable for the users and for the new projects to find new customers.

For an example, a developer wants to use “Frontend Template” to make his own personal website. But that frontend template has no “Dark/Light toggler” feature. He visits the project page on Ara, checks it’s issues. A maintainer moved the “light” toggle to the “Out of plan” mode. Because he wants to make the night mode only and doesn’t want to see light mode at all.

But, our developer sees, the fork links that implements the dark/light toggler. Users, starts to use that fork, and later fund the maintainer of the fork for further work. As one of Ara’s two rules is to fund flow to dependencies, a funding of the fork will send the most part to the og project, and now, fork owner may raise own issues, to atleast make the fork, still compatible with the original project. And later after maintainer changes ownership to all token owners, use it to merge his fork. :slight_smile:

Issues may be a universal tool here. For example if there is any “blockchain” project decided to use Ara, then I want to create an issue for it, saying “when to choose ethereum“. “when to choose solana“. There is also another reason why it’s gamified. It’s to make the research and it shows it as a node graph (but as galaxies, stars on universe, still technically presented as the node-graph).

User may pick the three objects: his own project, blockchain a, and link to ethereum. And create an issue that’s represented as the lines between the three nodes. It can research, and check how it’s feasible for his project, and write his own research. Or ask the search engine to find the similar project that can solve your issue. Basically trying to make the projects discoverable and to make them coherent with each other. So that each project can work on it’s own goal. Without being exclusive for someone.

Gamification’s own incentive is to simplify the “boring“ project management, collaboration, so that people could focus on the project data.

While, financial incentives exist only for the maintainer and conitrbutors. But not the token trading. I wouldn’t recommend users to make them tradeable coins. But only use tokens in the platform for voting on API or on the future roadmaps. However, I don’t want to make ban it neither.

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I don’t think messing with copyright assignment is a good means to encourage people to donate, and much of this seems like asking donors to accept extra stuff to do (playing the gamified game stuff among other things) when what latent-donors really want is just to have the software in good shape without them having to do much. It’s a collective-action problem.

I predict that the ideas you’ve put together will not motivate most potential donors to participate. It feels like too many weird extra layers without the key issue being resolved — how to assure that more of the wider crowd is all chipping in.

What I want as a potential donor is simply to have a collective agreement that my donations are happening in conjunction with many others, that we’re all in together, and thus our collective action will actually make enough difference. I don’t want gamified stuff or copyright assignment or computer-algorithmic rules about upstream distribution. I want the people doing the maintenance work to make conscious decisions about how the resources should be best used.

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Yep, I got this feedback and already simplyfying the mechanics.