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

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::ServeDir to smol just 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 use htmx ServeDir 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.

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.

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.)

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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