I just moved my calendar from a large email provider to a self-hosted Radicale server on Sandstorm (syncing with Thunderbird, and DAVDroid on my phone). Small steps, but it was surprisingly easy.
The bad news is that I am the only person working on it, and while I am an experienced developer, I am also a grad student.
In other words it is not ready for production at all. I have presented it to quite a few people for the purpose of finding help in the development, and everyone thinks it's a good idea, but everyone also wants to see a finished version of it before seriously considering helping out. Unfortunately, I can only work on Defiant in my free time, so developing the basic functionality is steady, but slow, progress.
Sorry to be that guy, and I know it's not a nice thing to hear. But I'd hate to see you burn a ton of time on something that's born under the cloud of "there are a million other ones just like it and no reason anyone can see why this one is worth investing effort into". I'd rather see you take all that effort and skill, find a project that's already got some momentum behind it, and get behind that and push - everybody saying "I'll build my own!" is half the reason we've got where we are in the first place.
On the other hand, maybe your framework has a genuine USP that I'm just not seeing. In that case, you'll have an easier time getting interest if you find a way to surface that, front and center, so that even the most disinterested professional engineer who's skimming HN by way of procrastination before the next code review can't help but see it.
Either way, hope this helps, and good luck in your future endeavors!
I think this is kind of a good point. It's too hard to set up these 'solves-one-thing-well'-suits to work together in the right way. Having collections of services that are super simple to set up and works well together is probably a good way to do it.
Like one media platform, one search engine, one social platform. Or perhaps having a couple of alternatives but having integrations in between up and running in a plug and play way.
Then again, if you want all this to work in a decentralised fashion you probably have to think about how to achieve that early on.
Put together a distro with a complete solution - mail server, web server, media and social servers.
Make it one-click easy to set up. Keep security tight. Maybe do some deals with cheap hosting providers.
Then federate and connect.