There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed:
> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729
> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729