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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[–] Blamemeta@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Make one post a day for a few months

[–] secana@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] silasmariner@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

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...

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] robinm@fosstodon.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

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.