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 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.
Beat me to the most obvious answer.
Being active is probably most important.
Maybe it would be possible to get a link into a “This Week in Rust”?
Good idea. We could try to reach TWIR on Mastodon.
As long as it’s posts with content and not just link spam every week.
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.
I have been in this community from the start and seen it grow from nothing to almost 5000 members, so I think this community have done pretty good. We are one of the top communities on programming.dev.
I have tried to post news, blog posts and updates that I find interesting and relevant for others to read. And while that provides some content to the community, it gives the community a bit of a Rust News Outlet kind of feel. So, what is missing from this community is a feeling of being alive. The only way to do that is for people to start posting more informal posts, and at this point I think that we should be very generous about what to accept. Other communities like /r/rust might not allow memes, and self promotion is generally frowned upon. But at the point where this community is, I would be happy to see all kinds of content. So go ahead, Ask questions, Post about your projects (even if it might be a bit of self promotion), re-post that funny meme you have seen somewhere (as long as this doesn’t turn in to a programmer humor place). Then if we get to the point were things starts to be problematic with a to loose attitude, we can address that when we get there. But that probably means we have gotten to the point were this place feels alive.
Make one post a day for a few months
And engage in the comments when you have something relevant to share.
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 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.
That’s true. If you are a rust beginner, you find so many good posts on Reddit for simple questions just by googling. Lemmy never pops up with a good answer.
Yes. I agree. A majority of the posts in my timeline is just someone posting the news. Lots of the posts get no engagement. Upvotes, yes, but zero comments. I kind of dislike it. I already have a feed reader and I don’t view Lemmy as a news feed… I’m here for the discussions.
So, news maybe, if people engage and use this to write their 2 cents beneath that. But I’d definitely appreciate genuine conversations and helping people or just talking or learning things.
I see it as a news feed with discussion, but a news feed first and foremost. But either way, I like engagement too, sometimes people bring up really good points that aren’t in the original article.
Hmmh. I think ‘link aggregator’ is somewhere in the description. You’re right. My issue is that oftentimes it doesn’t work because it’s just the link and no comment. While hackernews or my favorite tech blog with just their (unfederated) readership has dozens or hundreds of comments to the same thing. And sometimes I ask a question about the news article and don’t get a reply. It often feels like the people posting just dump random news without engaging and the community also just scroll past…
I’d be okay if it were a news feed WITH discussion…
Maybe I’m a bit negative. That’s mainly because I envision Lemmy to be more. And there are news articles that get attention. But I got a bit disappointed with that. In my eyes it’s mainly world politics and negative articles that get people to express their opinion and dissent. Rarely the positive ones. And I need a balance. I’m okay with discussing the wars in the world and the rise of right-wing nuts or useless politicians if I get on the other hand positive news, meaningful discussions about OpenAI’s Sora, computers and societal and technogogical progress. But it’s a bit skewed here, one thing happens, the other one gets 3 comments at best. I understand it, it’s always easier to disagree or talk about emotional topics. And it’s the same on other platforms. But it got me mildly annoyed with people and I restrain myself a bit from being part of that. I’ve lately focused more on talking about my hobbies, answering personal questions and helping people with tech issues. And less politics and news. But that’s just my 2 cents and I don’t want to tell anybody what to do.
Yup, “outrage sells” is very much a thing here as it is on the Internet at large. The best we can do imo is to post a lot of the positive stuff as well, and hopefully enough people engage to make it interesting.
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.
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.
Personally I would like a pinned post to ask/answer questions (and maybe the reddit tradition of asking what is everyone working on this week). Right now I’m trying to port
tower_http::services::ServeDirtosmoljust for fun. I’ve read https://notgull.net/new-smol-rs-subcrates/ and became motivated to give it a try, sadly when I needed to serve a file to usehtmxServeDir panicked with a tokio rt not found so I figure I give it a try porting it but quickly found myself not knowing how to port some things involving streams. I don’t like asking questions in discord, it’s not made for that, examples being the poor discoverability for future people looking for a similar question.I like that idea! I’ll try to share more, what I’m working on and where the difficulties are.
Earlier today I thought about making a post asking about a design choice for one of my pet projects, but then i thought: Is that really relevant?
There is a lot of generally informative content here, like the talks or blog entries, so I thought it didn’t quite fit. Maybe we should start just sharing thoughts on our pet projects and design choices?
I’m building something that will help me create releases for projects on git servers, publish crates, generate change logs and so on. Up to now I was using git2 as a dependency and pushing, tagging and so on with the API, but then I thought “maybe I can just use the cli interface of git”, reducing the dependency chain of my crate and not having to worry about finding the right API calls. I’m not sure what the better choice would be. (I’m only using porcelain commands, for now)
This community really lacks more personal questions and thoughts, so it not just fits it is desired!
Just post it!
Post it!
I think that instead of trying to grow this community, we would be better off by rewriting the existent large communities’ members in Rust for a safer approach.
It’s a problem on every niche community on Lemmy. Enough people are used to just trying the subReddit that if you create the subreddit there, people just show up.
We don’t have that on Lemmy. You’ve basically gotta get 2-3 people to keep posting content and hope a few more find it on top > last X hours. But it generally takes weeks of throwing content into a void to get there.
It’s why the meme communities are doing better. It’s a hell of a lot easier to throw two dozen memes into an empty void than it is to throw higher effort posts into the void. (It’s not an actual void. Maybe one in ten posts will get real interaction. That just feels a lot like a void when you’re putting in the effort.)
As a smaller community I think we can (for now) lean into things that wouldn’t be acceptable on r/rust.
As people gave said that could look like updates on small projects. It could also look like shit posting silly rust related jokes and such. And lower quality questions that spark discussion.
I imagine there are other things as well. Like maybe screenshots of dev setups or random musings
I am here very much as a lurker for now. I am working my way through “the book” (and am also about halfway through rustlings). But I would love to see this community thrive and succeed. I will try harder to engage on posts that are relevant to me, and make new posts if/when I can.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
That’s your opinion and I don’t share it.
Fair
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I don’t think that would be allowed on Programming.dev or Reddit.com
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There’s an entire instance that implimented your proposal that was quickly blocked by the largest instances. They were considered spam. It resulted in the opposite of growing community engagement.
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Getting hung up on the difference between a mirror and a relay is moot. I don’t see how people would be more accepting of that. In fact it seems like more people would object to having their posts mirrored to reddit considering the reason many are here is to stop participating on Reddit.
And it doesn’t eliminate the initial problem which is that the posts will be considered spam by the largest instances.
So you could not care and do it yourself, but I suspect that it will result in the same reduction in community engagement as the prior attempt.
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