Ask HN: What's the best (non-spammy) way to promote an open source tool?

I agree with this one. I have a niche open source project (ntfy) that is somewhat popular in its space, and my promotion so far has been almost exclusively in the r/selfhosted subreddit. It is very very tricky to find a subreddit that will even accept self-promotion, though, and you will always walk the line.

My strategy has always been to be humble, be kind, respect the subreddit rules, and only promote if you have something actually valuable to share (new features, relevant things). And then only one per month or so.

And, as OC said, posts with screenshots or GIFs do so much better.

> Projects with gifs on reddit get more attention.

Corroborates my experience, that is what I did to successfully get some attention for Lusift (https://github.com/lusift/lusift).

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/wpuohd/i_created_a_j...

That's very meta. Explaining how to promote open source software by promoting some open source software. I like it

+1

turns out most of these repositories have contribution guidelines. you can create a PR on your own.

FWIW I recently started listing these awesome lists to post your OSS project on GitHub. [1]

hope it helps!

[1] https://github.com/fmerian/awesome-developer-first-directori...

+1 for this.

Still fondly remember using the venerable freshmeat website to window shopping online for open source software.

Yes, but where would the world be if people didn't share things with each other?

Good projects need to be known. As a developer, you still come across new tools that you wish you knew earlier.

But feedback is important, and we'd love to get it to more relevant people who can benefit from it!