First of all, I’d want to thank you all that subscribed to the community and doubly so for those that are actively contributing, posting and writing comments. I might be missing some data (federation is never perfect) but it seems that !emacs@communick.news is the most active Emacs-related community in the whole threadiverse.
Second, it is no secret that I am working hard to have an ethical and sustainable alternative to the walled gardens of Big Tech, and I think that having at least one community on Lemmy that could surpass the reddit equivalent would be an impressive milestone.
Given that, I want to ask for your feedback and your help to increase the momentum. What can we do to make this place a reference not just for the fediverse, but the whole Internet?
So far, what I’ve been doing:
- Checking all the resources that we have on the sidebar (which was shamelessly copied from reddit)
- Following #emacs on Mastodon to find out interesting links that could be posted here.
- Inviting people I find on /r/emacs and on Mastodon for them to join this community.
Bear in mind that I am not looking for “growth at all costs” and I really do not want to sacrifice quality over quantity. I think we can “win” by continuously attracting the people that are passionate about Emacs and slowly converting them away from Reddit and into here.
As always, feel free to throw around all of your ideas around. I am pretty sure that something good will come out of this discussion.
One striking difference between reddit and here so far is absence of non-link posts. On reddit, people often ask questions and get useful responses. No so much here, for now. Part of the problem might be that experienced users whom you invited (AFAIU) are less likely to ask things in general forum.
You are absolutely right, but I have to say that this focus on attracting the experienced users first was intentional. I think that if I just asked random people to come and post a question here with no one to answer, they would be quickly discouraged and give up on Lemmy altogether.
Now that some of the knowledgeable people are here, we can also start inviting others and say “hey, try posting on Lemmy and you will get a pool of good people who can help”.