Trello is enforcing more limits, could this be an opportunity for Focalboard? Official community fork?

[alexeyqu]

Context

Earlier this week Trello announced new collaborator limits on Free workspaces, with 10 members being the cut-off limit for the Free plan.

This change is disrupting the work pipelines in some of the non-profit projects I am involved with, and I am looking for alternatives. It's not just me; there are a few popular topics on Reddit from people who've faced the same problem (tap, tap).

Focalboard keeps popping up -- followed by a note about "but it's discontinued, so.." Either way, currently this repo attracts attention from folks considering to use or self-host a Trello alternative.

Opportunity

This could be an opportunity to bootstrap a community effort around Focalboard. The crowd might big enough to run an "official community fork" and start working on it. Otherwise the effort could be duplicated, or people will move on to other projects.

Call for action

Please comment if you're willing to contribute. Please do mention areas you'd like to support (i.e. front-end, back-end, UX etc) and anything else you consider relevant.

Personal story

IMO Focalboard has a friendly codebase which is easy to navigate. I don't have much experience with Typescript or Go. Still, I was able to enhance the Trello importer with some medium effort (#4874, not converted into a PR yet), adding import support for custom fields etc.

[alexeyqu]

Related: #4875.

[alexanderadam]

As this seem to be just a question I'm asking one too:

Wouldn't it be much easier just to use Vikunja, since it's actively maintained?

Furthermore it already supports imports from Trello, Todoist and Microsoft To-Do amongst some other features that people are asking here for Focalboard.

[alexeyqu]

That's a great comment @alexanderadam -- I am not part of Focalboard team, I am not advocating that getting Focalboard development back up running is paramount. This is just one of options.

Still, Vikunja also lacks some features that I need (e.g. custom fields are discussed since 2021 and still are not part of the roadmap). Also, its Trello import process is powerful but AFAIK lacks the mapping process between users, so importing a large board with 1000s cards will require a large amount of manual work to re-assign them. Or, again, deploy a self-hosted app and enhance it with custom scripts to map the users during the import.

[alexeyqu]

I went ahead and forked focalboard into a dedicated organization. https://github.com/alexeyqu-focalboard/focalboard

For now I'll use it as a stub for forking further into projects I maintain. It would be awesome if this gains some traction and/or endorsement from the Mattermost team and finally will be transformed into this "official community fork" where development happens. If that happens, I'd be happy to transfer the ownership / discuss a more appropriate name / otherwise remove my direct affiliation from this organization.

Lmk at code-focalboard [at] lxqu [dot] dev if you want to contribute. I don't have the capacity to become a full-time maintainer, but I would be sad seeing this project fade without proper community support.

Linking some issues where the current focalboard state is discussed: #4983, #4875.

cc @azigler since you saw this issue already I am tagging you one more time for visibility

[giuseongit]

@alexeyqu thank you for your proposal. I strongly believe that this product can be community maintained and I'd like it not do fade away. I began to point out your fork to some PRs, hoping to see them merged sooner or later

[emjayess]

I've just deployed mattermost, and then in exploring the ecosystem further, found myself on this thread. I've not tried focalboard previously, but interested in giving it a run (and possibly contributing)...

Is there a round-up of forks in the wild?

[alexeyqu]

Hi @emjayess -- I don't know about other forks, but I'm leading a team of contributors to sysblok/focalboard (forked from alexeyqu-focalboard/focalboard, forked from this repo).

We are using focalboard for multiple teams at the non-profit popular science media project (@sysblok), which used to rely on Trello for editorial and internal purposes. @sysblok's boards are rather heavy (1000s of cards, 100+ members) and we have improved the import process and delivered some UX / efficiency improvements to accommodate that. Some of the chances in @sysblok-owned repo are reflecting the internal practices, but most can be reapplied.

What is your goal in running focalboard?