Hello all,
As I’ve watched over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a general decline in activity. I’ve been thinking about this a bit and had a couple of questions:
Do we want to put particular effort into attracting and building a community?
If so what would that look like?
What would make this a useful place for people to visit, ask and answer questions?
I guess in short: How do we keep this place from (dying in ignominy)/(a viable alternative to reddit)?
I think one thing that could be done is to contact similar communities and maybe make a hub or something?
For instance, there’s Doom Emacs, FreeBSD and Logseq. Maybe there’s something that could be done from communities binding together to attract people?
I personally don’t use reddit often at all anymore. Ill respond on here or on the discord/matrix server. The problem is there is no one size fits all kind of approach to this. When the dark happened I saw people wanting a forum like this but as soon as an instance was spun up and made official I saw a sub-group of people leave cause they had wanted a federated Lemmy instance instead. Then the sub-reddit re-opened after pressure and threats were made to Mod’s by reddit. We have people everywhere. Some are on Lemmy, some are here, some are back on reddit. There was a post on here earlier that we should not tie this instance to r/selfhosted anymore and make our discourse seo better. I think we could really build this up with some positivity and general open mindedness.
I don’t use reddit either anymore and at first, I also thought a lemmy instance would be great but the truth is… reddit is simply not a good format for this (and probably lemmy too). It is much more convenient to have everything categorised and more easily searchable.
Making a community takes time, even thought it already exist, this is another platform so we need to create interesting content here.
When I was on reddit, I felt like I constantly saw a string of tech support requests to r/selfhosted.
Here… we don’t have any of that. But apparently no other conversation either?
I feel like that indicates… something.
This post tangentially relates to the other one about bad SEO, and that’s something we can work on.
Other than that, the issue is just making it a place with good data. That means people being consistent and posting as they’re able to here.
That’s much harder to do now, especially considering how fractured the community is. I’m open to ideas and suggestions in regard to both this issue and the SEO issue / new names.
Does Discourse have bad SEO?
The core issue here is that there is no content, no one is really asking or answering questions, or blogging experiences, or creating tutorials, or flaunting cheap hauls or… anything.
Have a look at discourse.chaos-dwarfs.com for example, full of cool blogs, some questions and answers, lots of active members.
Discourse has excellent SEO. It even hits the top result on google if it has the relevant content & title.
You’re right. Everyone in this thread should be challenged to post something.
I don’t usually ask for help, but rather search online and eventually muddle my way to a solution. But it’s time to drink our own kool-aid.
I think that is a great idea. At some point there should be a discussion about the goals for this community (what do we think we can reasonably be?).
As far as creating content goes, I’ve got a couple of thoughts.
It might be nice to run a series of “Content Campaigns” where we encourage people to post on
somewhat related themes. For example, a series of posts about “gotchas” when selfhosting.
A couple of examples include
docker-compose but recently ran into an issue where I needed to use docker compose because of the versioning of docker files.Yes most of these are easy to google after you have run into the issue but how do you learn about these things ahead of time?
An alternative campaign might be about good, up-to-date tutorials.
I think we could come up with a good set of topics that would be beneficial. I’m imagining it as a way to condense a lot of the issues people run into. If it is condensed, then it should lead to a lot of people accessing it frequently, which leads to good rankings, which leads to a larger community. That’s kind of why the reddit site works.
Exactly. We should encourage members to post their guides/tutorials here even ones which are very noob friendly. Basically, a sort of “blog” for those who don’t have their own blogs.
This platform could serve as a hub of guides and you automatically get “comments” in the form of thread discussions. Authors and the community can help each other this way.
This is one of the reasons I started some threads asking questions to get people involved. It has received a lot of responses and I get daily notifications. If we can get this going and promote it more then in some time we might have more participants.
Completely agree with this and down to do it. We can create another category where ppl share their blogs or similar content.