The above is very much aligned with the original vision:
The above post is dated 2020-07-17 – this site has been up for over two years.
How are we doing? Should we be doing anything different? Are the notifications OK (rate, etc can be configured)? Is there anything annoying about this community/platform that can be fixed?
We still don’t have a large number of members, but there are pageviews:
To gain numbers, it probably helps to have a defined purpose centered around a popular OSS project or some narrow interest. For example, the KiCad forum is doing quite well. But, numbers is not our goal here.
Originally, I questioned if this forum should be invite only, or open sign-up. One concern is a community can quickly get colonized (the term Brendan Eich uses)
by toxic people. So far, this has not been a problem as social media is probably a much more attractive platform for most.
Personally, I find it useful to write and share stuff. And Discourse is by far the nicest platform I’ve ever used to do this (I even like it better than Wordpress, which is very good). So the personal benefits to me are:
- a nice micro-blogging platform – I think better when I write
- get curated, interesting news from other who post
- an on-line notebook where I can post useful information that I can quickly find later
- occasional discussion with smart people
Fun is key, and perhaps something I’m not very good at. Perhaps the new chat functionality could help here. If you have something fun or want to share what you are working on, feel free to post to chat channels. Chat can be used for more transient information that has less long term value. Discourse chats are only visible to forum members. Khem, Collin and I have been using chat over the past few weeks – seems to work very well.