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
[META],[RUST BASICS],[RUNNING THREAD].- 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.
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!