How have you built a local community around Discourse?

[justinm]

@opcourdis

Root cause : many people cannot properly configure their mailbox and are losing an essential tool for daily organisation that discourse was very right to be built with. There are people that are very grateful that I showed them how to create mailbox rules hence the following could be an interesting experiment :

2. You could reuse your real life promotion strategy by asking people to which categories they would like to subscribe and tell them how to create a main mailbox filter.

Tell them that they will only receive emails from those categories + those they answer to and that each month they can comfortably check this specific mail folder. There are many forum members like me who for certain communities like to roll that way except for direct messages or topic I open, then no filter is necessary.

I think this is a good thought (and probably good advice for people to follow), but: Any solution that requires me to manually educate users will unfortunately not scale.
I need it to be as seamless as possible, where the only action required from users is to scan a QR code and sign up.
In other words, I need to meet my users where they are. Email is really hard to set up for most people, so I need to use the push notifications they typically expect to receive instead