How have you built a local community around Discourse?

I think a lot of people post in this category to ask questions / share how they have used Discourse to build a community around their business, but I haven’t seen many discussions on building communities with a completely casual/non-monetary focus.

In this day and age, I also think that many people have lost out on local community due to the ongoing decline of the “third place” and the lack of local hang-out spots. I think that Discourse is powerful software that can fill this hole in a way that other communication software (such as group chats) cannot.

Here are some really good examples or previous discussions where others have built local communities:

So, I want to open this up for discussion:
Have you used Discourse to create a geographically local community? Do you have any anecdotes to share? Have you migrated an existing community from different software?
What worked for you? What didn’t work for you?

This could be anything ranging from tabletop gaming, to a neighborhood community, to a sports league.
Just something that brings together a group of people from the same area

I’ll start:

I’m trying to build a local community built around a sports league that I play in.

Currently, we use a disparate set of group chats per team, with no real overlap inbetween. If you want to organize a party, you have to go to group chat A, post a link, go to group chat B, post a link, so on and so on.
If someone leaves the league, they won’t be a part of the new team’s group chat and they will be essentially exiled from the community. They’ll be forgotten when invites are sent out, and they won’t be a part of any ad-hoc events.

The worst part about the group chats is that nobody really wants to talk about anything. Every message goes to everyone, so posting anything there is pretty much akin to posting an announcement to a community.
You only really want to send messages about stuff that’s really “important” (open to interpretation). If a conversation is happening, you do not want to change the topic or you may not be available to listen to the entire conversation (and it gets lost to scrollback forever).

Basically, group chats just suck.

I used to be a huge user of forums back before Reddit and Facebook came along, and they really fostered a strong sense of community.

So, I set out and did a ton of research. The forums I used in the past were based on vBulletin, but I could see that Discourse is used basically everywhere nowadays; it’s ubiquitous. You can’t beat 'em, so join 'em.
And it was a really solid decision. The people who designed Discourse put a lot of love into this software. They live and breathe D&I (diversity and inclusion).

Of course, once you deploy a community you then have to bootstrap it. There’s nobody on the community, and you need to bring folks in.
I also wanted a private community - one where we can post with the reassurance that nobody is watching or stealing our data to train yet another AI model.

My strategy - which has been wildly effective - is to use Discourse’s invite codes and encode them as QR codes. I can then go to a physical space, talk about the forums, and show people the code that they can scan to join them.

On the forums, I created a category where folks can post party invites (using Discourse’s calendar plugin).
I created a few threads in the General category - my favorite is where people can post pictures of their pets. I got a lot of participation there!

However, we’ve caught up with the present and I’m having trouble growing the forums. The problem is that many people are simply not coming back to check the forums.
I think I know why - many people no longer use/check their email and Discourse was primarily built on email.

So this will be the next challenge: moving to push notifications so that people are nudged to come back

This isn’t the first topic to consider the benefits

I know I only do when something I need got sent…. and I’m old school old guy