The title says it all: How can we grow the Rust community here on Lemmy? Many users fled Reddit or are here for different reasons. But compared to it’s commercial big brother, the Rust community here, feels more or less dead. I would like to discuss ideas, on how we can changes that and make Lemmy the default for Rust related discussions, instead of Reddit.

  • stevecrox@kbin.run
    6·
    11 months ago

    I believe this post would be better if it was rewritten in Rust it would allow more efficent. memory usage compared to; the dynamically typed English language which doesn’t have the borrower checker. while allows you to detect when resources are no longer used unlike English’s poorly performing ‘grammar checking’ tools

    But seriously there has to be content to engage with and people who respond to the content. I’ve noticed this community has someone posting really high quality updates but the community appears to be that person.

    Posting blogs, or asking questions, etc… would be a good way to engage.

  • snaggen@programming.dev
    3·
    10 months ago

    I have been in this community from the start and seen it grow from nothing to almost 5000 members, so I think this community have done pretty good. We are one of the top communities on programming.dev.

    I have tried to post news, blog posts and updates that I find interesting and relevant for others to read. And while that provides some content to the community, it gives the community a bit of a Rust News Outlet kind of feel. So, what is missing from this community is a feeling of being alive. The only way to do that is for people to start posting more informal posts, and at this point I think that we should be very generous about what to accept. Other communities like /r/rust might not allow memes, and self promotion is generally frowned upon. But at the point where this community is, I would be happy to see all kinds of content. So go ahead, Ask questions, Post about your projects (even if it might be a bit of self promotion), re-post that funny meme you have seen somewhere (as long as this doesn’t turn in to a programmer humor place). Then if we get to the point were things starts to be problematic with a to loose attitude, we can address that when we get there. But that probably means we have gotten to the point were this place feels alive.

  • Gobbel2000@feddit.de
    1·
    11 months ago

    Being active is probably most important.

    Maybe it would be possible to get a link into a “This Week in Rust”?

  • parens@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I think it’s difficult to grow programming communities. The rust forums themselves aren’t the most active (a post an hour and maybe 2 comments an hour?) and those are official. Can we hope to grow beyond that?

    Personally, my presence here is mostly passive to read news about rust. I wouldn’t mind a bot posting links to:

    • official blog entries
    • blog entries from rust maintainers
    • merges to “awesome rust” repositories
    • videos uploaded by various rust conference channels
    • announcements from rust conferences

    Basically a “global” rust RSS feed that I don’t have to do the work of cobbling together.

    If that bot were opensource, then there could be suggestions to add RSS feeds or some other integration to get news.

    • snaggen@programming.dev
      1·
      10 months ago

      But do we really want this community to be a global RSS feed? I already think we should try to add more life to the community, a global RSS feed means even less life. Bot posts may add content, but it discourage interaction.

      • parens@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Looking at the posts right now, most of them are pretty much what the bot would post: blog posts, announcements, interesting repos. A bot would add more of that.

        To have people talking, you need to give them something to talk about and news is what people talk about, I think. We just have a large lurking community, which IMO isn’t bad. To have people talk more, the only things I can think of are

        • projects the community works on together (bot may be one)
        • podcasts or videos with the community
        • questions from the community

        A bot seems like the easiest in terms of investment.

  • ArmainAP@programming.dev
    11·
    10 months ago

    I think that instead of trying to grow this community, we would be better off by rewriting the existent large communities’ members in Rust for a safer approach.

  • PlexSheep@feddit.de
    0·
    11 months ago

    Earlier today I thought about making a post asking about a design choice for one of my pet projects, but then i thought: Is that really relevant?

    There is a lot of generally informative content here, like the talks or blog entries, so I thought it didn’t quite fit. Maybe we should start just sharing thoughts on our pet projects and design choices?

    I’m building something that will help me create releases for projects on git servers, publish crates, generate change logs and so on. Up to now I was using git2 as a dependency and pushing, tagging and so on with the API, but then I thought “maybe I can just use the cli interface of git”, reducing the dependency chain of my crate and not having to worry about finding the right API calls. I’m not sure what the better choice would be. (I’m only using porcelain commands, for now)