Four years in, around 4,000 registered users, and I’m still the primary driver of forum activity. The forum averages somewhere between 5 and 15 new topics a week and around 65 active users (including my activity which varies ~ 20 to 30 percent.
The core challenge is that most active members have to be there because they genuinely want to be. There’s no external pull, no support requests tied to a product or service bringing people through the door to solve issues, no built-in reason to return.
Finding and retaining people who show up purely to participate with peers of a niche interest is a different problem from running a product-backed community, and it’s one I haven’t fully cracked yet.
I’ve tried things like daily discussion topics to keep things moving, which helps at the margins, but the community still hasn’t reached the point where it sustains itself without my large involvement.
I’m curious whether others here are running general interest communities in a similar position and what’s actually moved the needle in terms of getting members to show up and engage on their own. To the point where activity is healthy and trending upwards even without babysitting it, as it were.
I’ve trying be consistent with my community so I do many cases studies to understand how keep this actives users engajed in a organic way not forcing anything or moderating crushing the limits
Others communities that was looks like mine was closed I remove all ads and i simply keep posting and improving my instance and SEO do the rest of my work.
You mention niche interest and you mention general interest - I’m not sure what kind of forum you’re talking about.
Forums about a hobby or a craft seem to be viable, but there’s always a 99-9-1 rule, which says most content will be initiated by 1% of your members, or by 10% of your active members. So you do need a fair number to make those numbers work out.
Agreed. More recently I’ve been focusing on the content and pages on the parent website and forum, and less on chasing the waves of activity.
Smaller forums are more volatile; sometimes you have weeks of good activity and then weeks of very little, even when traffic is up.
The focus has to stay on what improves that long-term, and that really just comes down to growing the member base, keeping those who sign up active as much as possible without bombarding members. But yeah, 40k members instead of 4k would be much better.
Yeah, this is a really common dynamic. I have not yet been involved with a community which I’ve been able to make myself obsolete from, unless I was obsolete to begin with!!
Basically, I ensure that I don’t put too much time into it. If the founder, I aim to be no more than the 3rd most active member, but if I’m honest I rarely achieve this. I do allow myself to tinker around the edges fixing stuff though. Just try not to post too much.
One of the things I like about meta.discourse.org is that I’m way down the list!
