New Maintainer & New Direction of Project

[WisTex]

I have been in discussions with the existing maintainer of Fork Awesome about becoming the new maintainer of Fork Awesome. If I become the new maintainer, Fork Awesome would fall under the umbrella of Federated Works, which is working on several open source projects in the fediverse and social web space.

As mentioned in the retrospective, we probably need to go in a different direction. In the meantime, we will continue to maintain the existing web font while we come up with a new strategy.

Some of the issues that are present include:

• Since browsers now support SVGs natively, there is less of a need for web fonts.
• The current web font building process is broken, so we would need to come up with a new process.
• There are other font and icon libraries out there, and Fork Awesome has not distinguished itself as being unique or popular.

To address these issues, we will need to consider the following:

• Many projects (including ones I maintain) use Fork Awesome, and it would take a lot of work to change that dependency.
• There is a demand for fediverse and social web icons, and we can distinguish ourselves by catering to that audience.
• Although many say SVGs are superior and want to phase out web fonts, many people find them easier to use when marking up code.

Considering the above, we intend on making the following changes:

1. Create a new website with built-in fediverse connectivity (social media channel & perhaps support forums).
2. Emphasize that we have Fediverse and Social web icons, to make our icon set unique.
3. Make the icons available in multiple formats, including web font and SVG.
4. Collaborate with other icon developers in the fediverse and social web space.
5. Connect the Fork Awesome project with various Federated Works projects, to give the icon set more visibility.
6. Continue using Fork Awesome in Hubzilla, Neuhub, Unbranded Social, and other projects.

As you can see, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

Until Federated Works takes over maintenance of Fork Awesome, the website will say that the font is deprecated. Once we get the new website up and make some visible progress, the deprecation notice will be removed.

I will be creating additional issues related to this on GitHub.

I will keep you posted, and let me know if you have questions or want to contribute to the project.

[titlestad]

Awesome! I will try to lurk around if I can do anything to help. I have experience with development across many languages, build systems, etc, as well as with file formats, so if there's any stumbling blocks, I'd be willing to spare some time.

[codecat]

Great to see this will remain maintained. 👍 I'm an active user of Fork Awesome, mostly out of habit, but also due to compatibility with older projects (that are out of my control).