[diggan]

> Really surprised such a big community hadn't gotten sick of it already and built an alternative.

There is already, probably the biggest contender at the moment would be r2modman/Thunderstore, which is a relatively game-agnostic modding website + mod manager. Seems a lot more "open" (both in terms of source code and community) than Nexus ever was.

[noirscape]

r2modman is just an alternate frontend to Overwolfs nonsense and basically exists on the grace that most people install Overwolfs launcher (Thunderstore, which confusingly is also the name of the repository hosting the mods - my understanding is that the original devs of Thunderstore sold their repository to Overwolf) for it instead of r2modman.

As implied by negativity in the prior sentence, Overwolfs stuff is pretty awful to use; compared to r2modman, it feels like you're installing a PUP instead of a mod manager. There's lots of ads and it's pretty clunky to use.

[diggan]

I don't know enough about Overwolf to say yay or nay, but it is possible to use r2modman/Thunderstore without Overwolf, since I never had it installed yet I have mods published on Thunderstore + used it in the past for using mods. So I don't feel like Overwolf being bad should translate to r2modman+Thunderstore also being bad by association.

[noirscape]

It's more a warning to not get the Overwolf version of "Thunderstore", which is what they named their mod manager.

R2modman is fine, but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point. Which is mildly concerning.

[diggan]

> but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point

The source of r2modman is available, and under a FOSS-compatible license (https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus), together with a relatively small but dedicated community. Ideally, the actual file sharing shouldn't be centralized (imho), but it sounds overly alarmist to say it can be shut down at any point.