A while ago I was having a lot of troubles trying to figure out how to make open source development work. It was a completely new endeavour by me and I kept running into payment processors issues. In desperation I wrote about it in Hachyderm, which is my primary mastodon instance and someone suggested to contact Nivenly which is an org created explicitly to provide guidance to such matters for open source software and are also based on Hachyderm.

While I discussions were ongoing with them, work was progressing on the AI Horde itself but I had eventually realized that I can’t keep everything under the AI Horde moniker. The AI Horde itself is the main middle-ware making it all possible, but nobody can use it in isolation. We don’t only need the Worker backends, but we also need the various frontends and bots which the end-users will use.

So I set up a Github org to provide an overarching group for the whole official ecosystem around the AI Horde. I called it Haidra, as is both can portmanteau the “AI” part but it also represents the endless potential between the integrations around the AI Horde. It is also one of my favourite concepts.

Long story short, Haidra is now hosting all the repositories that the public AI Horde needs to run, along with a lot of helper libraries and UIs. It has as members all the people who have provided invaluable support in development or community building. We also designed a neat logo for it using the AI Horde and a competition in our discord server which Tazlin further polished as our new logo. You can see it as the featured image in the post.

And today I’m excited to announce that Haidra has also officially joined the Nivenly Foundation!

While there’s a lot of people helping to make Haidra what it is, most of the community building still falls on me, along with the social outreach. Likewise there’s a lot of questions and problems around governance of an expanding community which are really not my strength. This is where Nivenly comes in.

The plan is that they will help us with best practices on growing and sustaining our community, and finding more volunteers, especially in community management and software development. They will also provide us with governance and legal support as needed. And generally plug any holes which a lot of developers (including with me) don’t have the skills to deal with.

I hope with The backing of the Nivenly Foundation, we can all together take Haidra and the AI Horde to the next level and ensure that Generative AI remains available for everyone forever!