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.
I think it comes down mostly to spreading the word that this community exists. For a lot of people, Reddit is the “default platform” for topic-based forums. Changing that mindset is difficult.
Personally I wouldn’t expect forum communities outside Reddit and the official Rust forums to really grow much unless Reddit dies. Maybe there’s a way instead to somehow get the official forums connected to Lemmy? That way you’d get all the users of the forums right away without needing to ask those users to change platforms.
Edit: what I think would be the dream solution is the official forums looking and behaving the same, but being accessible through ActivityPub-based services like Lemmy. It would only really let forums users post specifically on the Rust forums and browse Rust content on the site, but would allow federated users to also communicate there through Jerboa/Sync/etc using accounts made on other federated servers.
Make one post a day for a few months
I don’t think this works. The communities which are successful here on Lemmy are the ones where a large group of people left Reddit at once. For example the piracy people or the german meme community and a few other examples.
I’ve seen several communities in which one or individuals post daily, but it somehow doesn’t really lead to more engagement. It stays more or less the newsfeed of that person. It is better than a dead community and a few people read it and maybe upvote, but I’ve never seen this approach generate traction and change things around in a substancial way.
At least that’s my observation. Feel free to send me counterexamples if I’m wrong… I’m also interested in how to foster healthy and nice communities… But at this point I have no solution to offer.
@h3ndrik @Blamemeta I wonder if having fakebut interesting comments would help (ie. written by alt-account of the author) . I noticed that I have significantly higher chances to participate in the conversation if there are already 5-6 comments than 0-2, especially if they open the dialog.
I think we just need more open ended posts. A lot are just “check out this blog post,” which is super long and technical so little just nope out.
If most of your posts are like that, you’ll get minimal engagement, and people with more “basic” questions may be intimidated to post.
So post some stuff like, “I went to do X in Rust, but the borrow checker isn’t happy. Can someone explain what I’m doing wrong?” I think that’ll drive some engagement and encourage others to post similar questions. I don’t want this community to only be code reviews and whatnot, but a mix can help the community feel a bit less weighty.
Sure. I think there is a name for that specific kind of sockpuppeting but I don’t remember. People do that, comment on their own post and it works. I don’t think it’s bad per se. What works best is replying something outrageous or wrong… Because people like to object and correct people more than they do write positive comments.
In my opinion it needs to be genuine. I’m okay with lots if things if people are interested in an answer. What I don’t like is artificial boosting of engagement or manipulation. If people only do it so the number of comments increases and they aren’t really interested in my answer… It just wastes 10 minutes of my day replying to them instead of helping someone with their computer troubleshooting.
Ultimately, I’m not sure where Lemmy is headed. I had quite some good conversations here. And I had some bad encounters. Overall I think it’s a positive place. I don’t think we have to grow just for the sake of it. But we definitely need more people and more engagement to make some communities useful.
I’ll try to post more. Maybe cross posting from here to Mastodon helps. I’ve the impression that the Rust community is more active there.
Honestly I really miss the Reddit programming subreddits (never went back after they shut down RiF) but I was usually just a lurker there. There are certain things I’d weigh in on,.and some things I wouldn’t, and if you’ve not got much content I guess a lot of ppl like me just won’t engage… Really it’s a chicken-and-egg problem though – if people are having interesting conversations here about Rust, some people will probably come to follow them and contribute; but you won’t get the interesting conversations if the people aren’t here. So maybe convincing people from other communities to have their chats here is the requirement. In terms of practical things do do? I dunno. Maybe linking to the occasional GitHub (drama or feature) is probably an easy thing that someone could do to get some conversations going for example maybe? But as I said, lurker mostly. Not really my thing to come up with posts…
I believe this post would be better if it was rewritten in Rust it would allow more efficent. memory usage compared to; the dynamically typed English language which doesn’t have the borrower checker. while allows you to detect when resources are no longer used unlike English’s poorly performing ‘grammar checking’ tools
But seriously there has to be content to engage with and people who respond to the content. I’ve noticed this community has someone posting really high quality updates but the community appears to be that person.
Posting blogs, or asking questions, etc… would be a good way to engage.
If a few big names here could possibly help. If someone from the Rust project itself or someone well known from YouTube posts here and engages in discussions, more people would be interested to join.
Being active is probably most important.
Maybe it would be possible to get a link into a “This Week in Rust”?
