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 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.
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)
Just post it!
This community really lacks more personal questions and thoughts, so it not just fits it is desired!
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.
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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