Good day,
Would be good to have a general topic here for talk about launching new discourse community sites, while there has been a lot of talk and topics about this already can make this one focused specifically about challenges of starting a new community site from scratch.
#1 challenge is what is the reason why new people would want to join, is there a benefit to them or the administrator, why try to recruit members?
Ideally a good community doesn’t need to do recruitment campaigns, if people can see there is a good atmosphere of discussion then they have an incentive to join so they then have opportunity to speak or write/discourse.
I had a few good members join initial sites have launched over about the past year, but have shut those down for now since there was not enough activity to justify keeping a discourse site running. I’m planning to re-launch a new discourse site within the next month or so, either hosted by discourse or independent server.
There are several great potential benefits of having a discourse site, but I have been surprised at how much resistance there has been to anyone I’ve talked to in person about this wanting to create and use a member account to communicate. One of the main benefits to me is that I don’t need to give out a mobile phone number for people to call or text wanting an immediate response, if they can send a message or create a topic with discourse then other people can answer questions sooner if they are online. I prefer not to carry a mobile phone if I can avoid that, and can’t handle people wanting to have important conversations thinking I am going to be able to write a good response with only thumbs on a phone that doesn’t even have a physical keyboard.
Anyway for launching an active community I would say generally most sites have a primary content creator which I can do more of have started making some video presentations can post those on discourse site so people can comment. Main theme is for architecture as in historic civic architecture, I only have an undergraduate minor degree in that field not a license to practice architecture so don’t introduce myself as being an actual architect. May be able to complete grad school for that within the next decade or two.
I can write more about general ideas for discourse, overall I would say this is a great platform but there seems to be some kind of irrational resistance within some folks who don’t want to communicate with this. That may have nothing at all to do with the platform itself but just for anyone who wants to launch their own site there are a few challenges to work through for that to work.
If anyone has comments about their challenges with launching a discourse community please feel free to talk about those here.