When we launched Civitai, we made a bold decision to make our codebase open-source. Some thought we were a little crazy – after all, how can you build something valuable if anyone can take what you've built and make it their own? But we believed then, as we do now, that it's not the code that makes an online community valuable; it's the people. That's why we're so grateful for all of you and why we have the Buzz rewards program.
We were inspired by Stability's open release of Stable Diffusion 1 and wanted to maintain that energy. Our vision was to have the community involved in the development of Civitai, which we envisioned as the Hub for the Community (hence the play on the Latin word for "community", Civitas).
The Challenges of Open-Source
Unfortunately, having an open-source codebase hasn't worked quite the way we had hoped. As we've integrated more systems and our database has become increasingly complex to handle all of the platform's functionality, we've lost the ability for anyone to easily jump in and assist with development without direct involvement with our team. To make matters worse, we haven't maintained good documentation about how to get things running or how to contribute, leaving potential contributors unsure where to start.
Introducing the Community Development Team
We need help from the community, and we're hoping that we can finally put the fact that we're open-source to good use. That's why we're excited to announce the launch of our new "Community Development Team"!
Here's what you need to know:
Close Collaboration: Members of our own dev team will engage closely with the Community Dev Team in Discord and on regular weekly calls.
Small but Mighty: We're starting small to figure out how to work with the community more effectively, but we plan to scale up over time.
Guidance and Knowledge Sharing: We'll provide helpful guidance, share knowledge about things that aren't well documented, and collaborate in planning the implementation of new features.
Transparency: We plan to live stream the Community Dev Team syncs on Twitch so that anyone can tune in and participate in discussions.
Perks: Members of the Community Dev Team will receive special cosmetics and special access to our internal dev team.
Future Opportunities: We hope that the Community Dev Team can be a great place for us to hire from as we look to expand our team in the future.
Optimizing for Community Involvement
To make it easier for the community to get involved, we're taking these steps:
Local Instance: We're optimizing the open-source codebase so that anyone can more easily run an instance of Civitai locally to participate in development efforts.
Incentives: We're currently assessing ways we might reward Buzz for meaningful contributions. We're also considering allow people to add Buzz to feature requests to incentivize community developers to jump in and assist with the development of the feature, so let us know what you think of that.
Why We Need Your Help
We're still a small team with only 4.5 full-time site devs (I'm the 0.5 dev because I still like to develop when I can). We're buried in initiatives that we need to focus on to get the business to be sustainable and to launch features that we think will help us get there. We have to balance that with important requests from the community.
From bug fixes to feature requests with hundreds of upvotes, there's just a lot to do, and we don't have enough manpower to do it all. By getting the community more actively involved in development, we hope to unlock a lot more manpower and get you the features you've been requesting much faster.
Top Community Requests
We've received hundreds of feature requests, with many having hundreds of votes. A few of the ones that are top of mind for us are:
Evolving the Bounty System to work better for contests and competitions
Improving the Browsing experience with things like:
And let's face it – we move fast and break things… maybe a little too often. So, there are lots of bugs that we'd love to get help squashing!
Join the Community Development Team
Are you a developer who's passionate about Civitai and wants to help shape its future? We want you on our Community Development Team! While this isn't a paid position, it's a fantastic opportunity to contribute to an open-source project you love, gain valuable experience, and potentially open doors for future opportunities.
To apply, please fill out our Community Development Team Application. We're looking for developers of all skill levels who are enthusiastic about Civitai and ready to dive into our codebase.
Let's build the future of Civitai together!