The title says it all: How can we grow the Rust community here on Lemmy? Many users fled Reddit or are here for different reasons. But compared to it’s commercial big brother, the Rust community here, feels more or less dead. I would like to discuss ideas, on how we can changes that and make Lemmy the default for Rust related discussions, instead of Reddit.
removed
I don’t think that would be allowed on Programming.dev or Reddit.com
There’s an entire instance that implimented your proposal that was quickly blocked by the largest instances. They were considered spam. It resulted in the opposite of growing community engagement.
I think it’s difficult to grow programming communities. The rust forums themselves aren’t the most active (a post an hour and maybe 2 comments an hour?) and those are official. Can we hope to grow beyond that?
Personally, my presence here is mostly passive to read news about rust. I wouldn’t mind a bot posting links to:
- official blog entries
- blog entries from rust maintainers
- merges to “awesome rust” repositories
- videos uploaded by various rust conference channels
- announcements from rust conferences
Basically a “global” rust RSS feed that I don’t have to do the work of cobbling together.
If that bot were opensource, then there could be suggestions to add RSS feeds or some other integration to get news.
But do we really want this community to be a global RSS feed? I already think we should try to add more life to the community, a global RSS feed means even less life. Bot posts may add content, but it discourage interaction.
Looking at the posts right now, most of them are pretty much what the bot would post: blog posts, announcements, interesting repos. A bot would add more of that.
To have people talking, you need to give them something to talk about and news is what people talk about, I think. We just have a large lurking community, which IMO isn’t bad. To have people talk more, the only things I can think of are
- projects the community works on together (bot may be one)
- podcasts or videos with the community
- questions from the community
A bot seems like the easiest in terms of investment.
You’re talking about adding uncurated noise to the mix. I have a lot of RSS feeds that I browse through, but most of the posts I won’t share because they are just noise.
I have been in this community from the start and seen it grow from nothing to almost 5000 members, so I think this community have done pretty good. We are one of the top communities on programming.dev.
I have tried to post news, blog posts and updates that I find interesting and relevant for others to read. And while that provides some content to the community, it gives the community a bit of a Rust News Outlet kind of feel. So, what is missing from this community is a feeling of being alive. The only way to do that is for people to start posting more informal posts, and at this point I think that we should be very generous about what to accept. Other communities like /r/rust might not allow memes, and self promotion is generally frowned upon. But at the point where this community is, I would be happy to see all kinds of content. So go ahead, Ask questions, Post about your projects (even if it might be a bit of self promotion), re-post that funny meme you have seen somewhere (as long as this doesn’t turn in to a programmer humor place). Then if we get to the point were things starts to be problematic with a to loose attitude, we can address that when we get there. But that probably means we have gotten to the point were this place feels alive.
I am here very much as a lurker for now. I am working my way through “the book” (and am also about halfway through rustlings). But I would love to see this community thrive and succeed. I will try harder to engage on posts that are relevant to me, and make new posts if/when I can.
