this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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Meta: How can we grow this community? (programming.dev)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I personally think it's a bad idea. I do think relaying is a good idea though.

The reason I think it's a bad idea, is that when I see bot posts, I don't want to interact with them at all. I don't want to interact with them because I think it's unlikely people will read my comments. This has a negative feedback loop for me. In my opinion, what happens is bot posts start to supersede user posts, and more people stop interacting because they believe their comments and posts won't be read.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's your opinion and I don't share it.