Most FOSS discovery is broken. GitHub trending is gamed, Reddit threads go stale, and "awesome lists" haven't been touched in two years. Eight months ago I decided to fix that for myself, and ended up building something other people actually wanted.
I'm Emad, 18, based in Ireland. I run SeedOSS, a Telegram channel that curates open-source, FOSS, and privacy-focused software. Solo operation, no team, 5,600+ subscribers, zero paid promotion. This is how it works.
Why Telegram
Most FOSS communities live on Reddit, Mastodon, or Matrix, not Telegram. But it had a few things I couldn't find elsewhere:
- Posts are permanent and searchable. Someone can scroll back six months and find an app they vaguely remember.
- The HTML formatting support is genuinely good. Bold, links, blockquotes, inline italics, enough to make a post feel designed without being bloated.
- Telegram counts forwards separately from views. That's the only metric I actually care about, because a forward means someone found a post useful enough to send to someone else. Views are passive. Forwards are intentful.
The format
Every post follows the same structure:
<b>Project Name</b> — Language/Platforms
<blockquote>2–3 sentence description.</blockquote>
✨ Why it's amazing
🔗 Get it: <a href="...">GitHub</a> | <a href="...">F-Droid</a>
📲 Screenshots
📁 <a href="...">Source Code</a>
❤️ Sincerely: @SeedOSS
~~~
The blockquote is the hardest part to write well. It has a hard 40-word ceiling and can't editorialize. It has to say what the project actually does, not what category it belongs to.
"A powerful, modern podcast app" tells you nothing. "A podcast manager that gives you direct access to any RSS feed without routing subscriptions through a third-party account" tells you exactly why it's worth installing.
The `✨ Why it's amazing` and `📲 Screenshots` lines are placeholders I fill in manually. The written draft comes first, then I go back and add editorial opinion and visuals separately. Keeping them apart stops the description from becoming a sales pitch.
## The banner
Each post gets a banner. Most of the time I use whatever the project already provides, official artwork,
repo social previews, screenshots. When nothing usable exists I make one in Canva, keeping it simple,
logo, name, and a background that matches the project's colors. It doesn't need to be elaborate,
it just needs to not look like an afterthought.
## How I pick projects
No algorithm, no GitHub trending list. I look for projects that solve a real problem, are actively maintained, and don't already get covered everywhere. VLC doesn't need a SeedOSS post. Something like [AntennaPod](https://antennapod.org) or [Parabolic](https://github.com/nickvdyck/parabolic), apps that are excellent but genuinely underexposed, is exactly what the channel is for.
Most suggestions come from the community. There's a linked group where subscribers propose projects, and that pipeline consistently surfaces things I wouldn't have found on my own.
## What actually performs
Privacy tools and Android apps consistently get the highest forward-to-view ratio. Niche picks outperform well-known projects almost every time, which has reinforced the whole curation philosophy. A post about a small, well-maintained notes app with local encryption will get forwarded more than a post about a project everyone already knows.
The one that surprised me most was a post about [Parabolic](https://github.com/nickvdyck/parabolic), a GTK YouTube downloader. It's not flashy, it doesn't have a marketing site, but it does one thing extremely well. That post got forwarded at roughly 3x the channel average. People share things that feel like a useful secret.
Consistency also matters more than frequency. Two or three posts a week with real effort behind them outperforms daily filler every time.
---
If this sounds like your kind of thing, the channel is [t.me/seedoss](https://t.me/seedoss).
And one genuine question for the comments: what's a FOSS app you rely on that most people haven't heard of? That's exactly what I'm always looking for.
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