[michaelmior]

Genuine question: how are new community members supposed to find the community? I'd imagine a significant number of productive community members initially found the community via search. Of course there's no easy way to make things discoverable only by those who will contribute positively, but choosing to severely limit discovery seems like it's probably not the right choice for most.

[Kye]

Word of mouth. I didn't hear about Reddit, or Twitter, or Google, or any number of modern internet household names through those companies advertising. I heard about it from someone else. It was the same with the forums and IRC channels that came before. Someone invited me because they thought it matched my interests.

[TeMPOraL]

There are degrees to word of mouth, though. Stumbling on, say, HN comment from a year ago, that said one can find high-quality Star Trek discussions on /r/DaystromInstitute, is a form of "word of mouth". Being invited to a community personally by existing community member, who themselves were invited by an existing member, ... is a different kind of "word of mouth".

Like everywhere else in the "cozy web" reality, it sucks to be an outsider looking to learn something or start to participate somewhere. With increasing number of hobby groups moving to Discord - or worse, Whatsapp groups - there's no way to observe from the distance or "dip your toes". Instead, you're asked to commit time, effort and/or reputation from the get-go, even before you know if the thing it's worth it.

This very mechanism keeps me away from any communities I'd happily participate in if they were open discussion boards.

[Kye]

Discoverability is worse now without a lot of public forums, blogs, and websites. That was the passer-by's way to find these things before The Great Consolidation. They'd search it up on Google when it still worked, find the website, see the IRC info or the forum signup, and hop on.

That said, Daystrom Institute formed a branch on the fediverse during the Reddit shutdown with some other Star Trek subs: https://startrek.website/c/daystrominstitute

[7speter]

Ironically enough, subreddit sidebars were almost always a great place to find highly relevant and useful discords, forums and blogs.

[TeMPOraL]

Exactly. The current trends make a lot of places suddenly out of reach for passer-bys.

Thanks for posting the link. I am aware of the current location of /r/DaystromInstitute, and registered on that Lemmy instance already - but to reinforce my point, I actually learned about it thanks to someone posting that link on HN a few days ago, randomly, in the middle of the Reddit blackout discussion thread. Much like you posting it here, which will hopefully help some other interested people find it.

[michaelmior]

The network effect is amplified significantly however by the popularity of those companies. You're much less likely to hear about an individual Reddit community by word of mouth. However, once you're aware of Reddit, it's much easier to discover subreddits that suit your interest. The same isn't true of Discord.

[michaelmior]

Finding Reddit and Twitter by word of mouth is very different from finding a specific subreddit or Twitter account by word of mouth. AFAIK, Discord as a platform doesn't support internal discoverability in the same way as Reddit and Twitter.

[wyclif]

Absolutely the same experience for me with Google search, Reddit, HN, Twitter, Discord etc. Word of mouth or getting invites from friends.

[dkga]

Mostly by direct interest. For example, all Discord communities I participate are related to open source projects I follow.