#WeAreDotnet
Hey, fellow .NET fan! We finally wanted to take some time to talk about all the things #WeAreDotnet. The plans we have, some ideas we’d like to follow, and some of the rules we’ve set ourselves.
We had an amazing start with the project thanks to all you lovely people out there. The feedback we received talking about the whole project couldn’t be more positive. Within minutes we had the first signups and creators who wanted to be part of it.
As of writing this, we have ~800 members signed up, and roughly 80 creators which already account for a whopping 1500 indexed blog posts and videos and we’re just getting started.
The page currently has between 600 and 800 daily unique visitors which is huge given the fact we’re just a couple of weeks old and the majority of the time didn’t even have any content.
What is WeAreDotnet?
Let's just summarize again what this is actually about. WeAreDotnet is a new community portal aggregating and presenting videos, blogs, twitch, and other feeds of any creator with .NET content. We aim to make all these feeds searchable, which means for the first time you’ll be able to search through a ton of .NET content without any distractions from the typical LinkedIn, Google, etc feeds, pure.NET content mixed with some friends :)
It’s also a lovely brand because #WeAreDotnet!
Any user to sign up gets a nicely formatted link tree, and a member card and can create custom RSS feeds filtered to the creators they love.
And this is just the beginning!
What might it grow into?
We have lots of ideas of features we’d like to add over time, and we got tons of suggestions already on top of our ideas and plans. We’ll never add stuff like a job portal, there are just too many out there however something like a list of companies working with .NET might be a possibility.
We plan to extend the page with .NET-related user groups, and conferences and connect sessionize to the creators so you can directly see where to meet them.
One other thing we’re currently working on is analytics, we want to show creator’s how many clicks their videos and posts had but also allow every logged-in user to add favorites and see a history of what they visited.
Logged-in users will be able to create custom RSS feeds with their favorite creators as well pretty soon.
WeAreDotnet is also a place to network and connect, you’ll be able to search for other members in your country, and filter people by specific tags.
After all, a lot is planned!
Its all about .NET + Friends
This is the most important part and some We'll reuse further down so keep that in mind :)
Everything we do is always about .NET while we allow anyone to have more than just .NET content on their blogs/video channels we’ll only show unrelated content on their profiles. The generic content channels will always just contain .NET + Friends.
What do we mean by friends?
If you speak of .NET these days there are things typically developers want to know as well, such as Azure hosting, GitHub, Visual Studio, etc when working with .NET technologies there are often other tools involved which we just refer to as friends. To give you an example, we would allow an article explaining how to host a .NET Web API on AWS using some CI/CD magic on GitHub and some Cloudflare routing. However, we wouldn’t allow the same thing if it was about a node.js app as there are other portals for that.
So in short, anything that sorta belongs to Microsoft Development, .NET, hosting, etc is welcome which is already a huge space!
How are you guys doing all that? Doesn’t that cost a lot?
Yes and no, currently, with the traffic we have everything is covered by various grants and starter price plans. In total, we pay like 100€ per month so literarily nothing. However, the more features we add, the more visitors we have that will quickly become more and more and we already thought about how we’d like to deal with this.
First of all, we do not want to make any profits with this and we can’t stress that enough!
We are thinking about various options, like offering creators specific slots on the page that can be rented to offer Udemy or Pluralsight courses or maybe something like .NET-related licenses. Whatever we do here it has to be .NET related.
On top of that we’re working on some unique merch, everyone loves stickers and shirts and you can show you’re part of it and also help us a bit!
Last but not least we’re happy about donations via GitHub sponsors we’ll set up soon.
You said you don’t want to make any profits?
Yes, we don’t! Everything we receive we’ll use to pay our bills, pay some merch to use for giveaways, and things like that. A lot of excess money, if we have any, will be used for some nice stuff for the community.
Additionally, every month we’d like to select a couple of OpenSource projects from the .NET community and ask our community in a poll which one we should support. All remaining excess money we have will be used to sponsor .NET-related OS projects.
Think of it like a mini WeAreDotnet fund!
We’re here to stay, stay tuned for more awesome news and updates!
Go and check it out!
Tim+Matthias
