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I made a little hobbyist app for myself, and I think it's pretty nice and occasionally think about polishing it up and releasing it.

And the first reason I don't is because I'm not interested in promoting it, and it's pretty pointless to release to no one.

But the much bigger reason is because I'm not interested in implementing the remaining 80% that I don't use myself.


If you're not releasing it as a product for sale, there's absolutely no obligation to promote it, or add any features that you don't use. People can use it as-is if it fulfills a need, or fork it and add what they think is missing.
I made a random 30-line bash script that filled a small but critical niche (reimplementing an existing semi-niche tool to work with ipv6). I am bad at bash, but I put it on GitHub anyways, with a descriptive name.

Occasionally I check in on it, and see it's still getting pageviews, clones, and sometimes forks. A few people raised issues about something beyond the 20% I built, and I say "go do it yourself", and then they do but at least they didn't need to start from scratch.

I also made several hobbyist apps for myself. Sometimes I thought what if I just posted it as a Show HN, but I am just rarely in the mood for implementing features others ask for, outside of work which pays me enough that I'd oblige.
It's been 25 years now but this exact thing is why I switched majors away from CS in college, I decided back then that I didn't want an employer/client telling me what to build. I liked software as a hobby but think it would have been a miserable profession (for me, not projecting to anyone else).
I made one plugin for myself and released open source in github. The amount of, sometimes hostile, request I had to implement stuff I did not care made me stop the development.
Just tell them you'll be happy to consider including their patch to provide the missing features, or f-off. I've used a lot of open-source code which up-front says that issues requesting new features will be closed.

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