there goes my motivation

Yeah don’t let this stop you! If you do the side project for fun and/or learning, just go ahead and build stuff. Don’t look at other projects too soon so you give space to your own creativity. But perhaps compare stuff in a later stage.

For me it usually stops when I mentally calculate how much work it requires, and I realize I’d rather just play video games.

If you're looking for original ideas... I have bad news for you

But now you have the opportunity to build it in Rust or Typescript! /s

third panel: end up doing it anyway because it's fun

Who cares if it already exists, just make it.

Also consider the possibility when the other, more popular projects got enshittified. Now the fleeing users have an option to switch to your project. It actually happened on one of my side project. I made it because I want to try building my own version of X. It got ~2000 users, but later down the road, X got sold to a new shitty owner that waste no time to enshittify it, and my side project suddenly grow to 20,000 users overnight.

or you realize that the idea fundamentally wouldnt work. i wanted to build a lemmy music recognition bot until i remembered lemmy has no videos lmao

A Minecraft rewrite in Rust with a very specific engine and goals certainly hadn't been done... right?..

Guess that depends on what your goal is. Are you doing it for fun? Or for money? If it's the latter it's all in the marketing.

Most times I find that these projects are either old or badly made (often both). If you’re inspired and you feel like you can make them better, then go for it.

An artist isn’t going to refrain from painting a portrait of a dog if other artists have already painted dog portraits, so why should you?

If it brings you joy, you should make the 27th implementation of neofetch in rust.

That doesn't stop the Javascript frameworks.

Instead, you can try to extend the existing project with new features, possibly improving your code reading skills and discovering new practices

I've built little things that already have a solution when that other solution either didn't do it the way I had in mind or did more things than I needed it to. It really depends on how you're valuing your time and knowledge/experience in the end.

A project doesn't have to be unique as a whole. You can always take an already existing idea and add your own twist to it (new UI, new feature, better optimisation, etc). What's important is actually doing something instead of being stuck in an infinite loop of brainstorming idea.

Execution is what matters, not ideas. Anyone can half-ass an idea and say “I did it first” but whoever comes along and does it right is who gets remembered.

Learning is the main point of taking on a side project. Whether it's original or not doesn't matter

If it sounded cool to do, I do it anyway, and keep it to myself. Never have to clean that shit up. Unfinished? Who gives a fuck, I did it, job sorted.

If it sounded like it needed to exist... thank god, someone else did it for me! Not my problem. git clone, next idea.

Think of it this way: If there’s loads of implementations of an idea, it means there’ss already a market/need for it!

I came up with idea where instead of typing stuff like "5/6" "6*9" into the terminal, you could have gui interface.