I understand this might be as well simply "Starting a community" , but I also wanted to talk about my specific case. I want to know about discourse and the experience some of you might have had with area 51.
I've spend some time building this site because I saw a need and an opening. Maybe I was wrong. Also because I love SGU, Jeff's projects as co-founder and I'm not happy with my current options for my communication output needs in those topics, which are basically Quora, reddit and the SGU forums. I really don't like skeptics.sen as they are way too skeptic for my league.
2 weeks into it and I don't see a future for it anymore. I think I've failed into doing the hardest step, gathering a community, which comes to no surprise. Yes, maybe 2 weeks is too little to have any conclusive answer... Maybe I am way too anxious.
But now I'm wondering if you could provide some hints, for other people who want to start a discourse community like I did, on how to do it properly. If you will.
(few minutes later)
Amazingly enough, the awesome "your topic is similar to" feature I often use instead of search already got me some answers when I started this topic. I'll keep this as a narrative for now, maybe I should edit it later...
I'm not thinking in abandoning my 2 years roadmap just yet, but that topic alone already got me thinking probably I should. Take all this as a small lesson and move on. Sooner or later someone will make this better than I ever could anyway, if they haven't done it yet and I just didn't find it.
Anyway, what advice could you give to someone wanting to start a community with discourse?
(few more minutes later)
It seems like "your topic is similar to" keeps getting updated as I write, and so I just found yet another awesome related topic which does give me some hope to keep going. Now I wonder about the second part of my question...
I got no popularity at all, so far found no close friends willing to participate and I'm almost positive I couldn't make this work by myself.
Do you think I should continue?
More in specific:
- How long did it take for your community to launch?
- What is a good number for a critical mass? 35 active users? 100 registered?
- Thanks again to Jeff, I do understand if I am to continue I should probably invest a lot of time addressing his points. But, again, do you think I should?
I guess all I'm asking here is some professional opinion...