Open question, obviously.
The challenge is that some top-down structure and prompting, IMO, can help get things going. Moreover, some structure in the way people interact here might actually help collaboration.
My thoughts (I may have overthought this) …
- Generally structure things in order to combine both top-down structure and organisation and bottom-up self-organisation.
- Top Down (mods and “senior” community members)
- Guide and encourage operations
- Managing pinned posts for quasi-wiki style content
- Regular posts
- Maybe collect interesting questions and thoughts from the activity in the community?
- Maybe just ask my own interesting questions
- Maybe collect interesting issues and PRs from the repo.
- Encouraging and gathering participation and posts/content from people that may have something to contribute.
- Bottom Up (learners)
- Ask questions!
- Try to get setup to experiment and work things out for yourself (rust environment and then lemmy development setup)
- Collect and digest relevant learning materials
- Post insights and learnings, however rough and uncertain they may be
- Post ideas for something to explore and work out or work on together
- Use posts and aggregating posts with links to other posts as quasi wiki. IE, Use
running threadsandlink liststo provide places for general discussion and links to general or past discussions.- EG, “Lemmy’s Codebase Structure and Overview”. No need to have multiple posts on this question. Instead, there can be a running thread on it. People can make new top-level comments, and others can visit the post and sort by new to catch up and reply to new questions and thoughts.
- Danger being that people don’t know where to go to engage.
- Fuzzy line between what fits in a running thread and what deserves its own post … idea would be when a question or issue feels large and general enough to warrant a separate conversation.
- But, running threads can contain links to other relevant posts and so be link-lists too.
- Possible “running threads”:
- Overview of Lemmy’s codebase
- Rust Basics
- Moderate and Advanced Rust
- ActivityPub Fundamentals
- Getting Started on Running Lemmy for development
- EG, “Lemmy’s Codebase Structure and Overview”. No need to have multiple posts on this question. Instead, there can be a running thread on it. People can make new top-level comments, and others can visit the post and sort by new to catch up and reply to new questions and thoughts.
- Tags for kinds of posts? EG
[],[],[].- No need to be too strict about this I think, at least in the early stages.
- The aim is just to help people find content relevant to them and where they are up to.
- There would be some overlap here between these tags and any extant “running threads” (if people adopt them), but that’s fine IMO, as they differ in their function (general discussion v discrete post/project/topic) with conversations freely flowing between them where appropriate.
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I’ll admit when you had said lemmy book club I thought you had meant a place where we take a section of the code, review it separately (with a running thread on the section to ask questions, share knowlage) and then a time to review together as a group discussing what we’ve learned (voice chat or megathread)
I still like the idea of a central place where all lemmy codebase stuff can be talked about though
If you’d like I’d be happy to set up pinned posts for that sort of thing. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions. Might be good to be patient though and see who else comes along.
Generally though, I can see a schedule of some sort, going through the code base file by file or so. Mega threads seem like the easiest way to go, but getting together on a platform with voice chat could work too if that’s what people want.
Well that certainly fits here I’d say. Whatever works for people in the end!
I’m just passing through, but one challenge you’re never going to be rid of is bone-headed requests, complete basic questions, repeated daily ad nauseum ad infinitum - for this reason, keeping a wiki that not only includes helpful step by step guides, but also links to tangentially related threads will save mod work in the long run.
Stack Overflow and github style moderation loves to close threads that are a dupe, which is great from a power user or moderation perspective but terrible from the POV of a beginner who do need to ask the stupidest questions you’ve ever heard - but that is the domain of the teacher.
Yep, agreed. Basic issues and problems are very common. It’s why I’m eager to aim for as close to a quasi wiki directly in lemmy itself from the beginning. And also keen to avoid simply reaching for discord etc, as some are, understandably, keen to do.
I’ve been thinking, a lot of the casual discussion really feels like it should be in a real-time group like discord/matrix, though of course lemmy is more convenient. Kinda hard to say, but keep it in mind
Personally, I’m a forum/Reddit/lemmy person and prefer such over things like slack/discord/matrix for bringing discussions together.
If people want a matrix room though, I have no issues, much of the lemmy admin and fediverse admin talk is over there.
In the end though, lemmy is IMO better organised and more searchable. The only issue is that a community can get buried in the feed (though the scaled sort helps a lot). But then, one can visit it directly in the way they’d just visit a matrix or discord room and then sort the posts and then the comments as they wish.
But I may be off base completely here. If everyone would prefer a matrix room (or equivalent), let me know!
So, having gotten comments here and a couple of other places, and thought about it a bit … my thoughts going forward:
- My idea/hope of having “running general discussion posts” isn’t going to work … like at all … people rely on their feeds which means new posts need to happen.
- Instead, we should have regular posts around certain themes, projects and/or events. EG, regular reading club, like the planned twitch stream and any follow up posts. Similarly for digesting the lemmy code base. Probably also for “general rust problem” or “lemmy codebase problem” posts.
- So, as for measures in structuring this place:
- I’m thinking tags. Yea, they’re not native, but square brackets at the end of the title works well enough (eg: “My Post Title [MY TAG]”). We just have to agree to a list, likely in the side bar, and gently encourage people to adopt them.
- In reality, they shouldn’t be enforced as things get started. But there may be a point down the line when it will make sense to be more stringent about them. Laying them out now is really just about setting down ideas about what the community is about (and so I can use them).
- And then I (and other moderators) can write up digests and link aggregating posts to keep things better organised and give people a basis from which to browse the community.
Thoughts?
My suggestions for a set of tags (aiming for minimal and effective):
[]: Anything to do with learning and understanding rust[]: Ditto for the lemmy codebase/application[]: Ditto for the activity pub protocol and federation over it[]: Beyond specific aspects of any of the above and about bigger work such as developing a new feature or fixing an issue or deploying a test instance etc. A fuzzy one, but basically anything bigger/broader than the above[]: meta discussion about the community itself.
So something I’m thinking about is posting regular (weekly, fortnightly or monthly) “digests” of what’s happened here in that time period. I’ll provide links to posts or comments etc that seem interesting or notable.
This way, stuff can continue in mega threads or “general discussions” as I’m calling them, and then regular posts can appear in people’s feeds and point them to interesting things.
I like the idea of running general discussion mega threads for general chats, but the main issue they have is that activity in these threads/posts won’t appear in your feed. A regular digest helps with that.
Thoughts?
Am I off base in thinking mega threads are a good idea? They only work if people visit this community intentionally, so for getting started, they may just not work at all.
A compromise might be to have a pinned post that collects links to relevant/interesting posts.
EDIT:
Made this a separate post: https://lemmy.ml/post/11406465
