I’m Rosie Sherry, I build communities and I'm the founder of Rosieland. AMA 🔥

@sydney_liu_sl I love Front Porch forum, how it breaks the norms and has found a way to succeed with local communities. They do things like delaying the ability to respond to a message to once a day. Facebook would benefit from having this functionality 🤣 I'm also a fan of local communities and feel it is very much an underserved market. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/...

@mikestaub Honestly, I'm mostly disappointed. 😢 The deeper I dive into community the more problems I see that need to be solved. I really want people to step up. Most of the tools out there are not doing it for me and it's still too hard to do things that should be easy. On the plus side, there's plenty of room for innovation. I love the creator economy, but I also feel it's a bit too influence-y and most of these communities really serve themselves first. It's a bit of a nuance of what community is and isn't, the lines are definitely blurred, and that's ok. I detest the web3 world (sorry) and I feel it was a huge distraction and theft of what community actually is or could be. I'm a big fan of custom built communities (like PH and Indie Hackers) and hope to see more of these appear in the future.

@rosiesherry I agree with you 100%. The gap between the potential and what exists is enormous and I think web3 may have corrupted the term "community" with its get-rich-quick ethos. What do you think is the biggest problem that needs to be solved if you could only solve one?

@mikestaub @rosiesherry It's not quite ready for PH but i'd love to demo what I'm working on,... It is a pure, decentralized, creator economy and meCo is designed to not be a middleman... our tagline is 'Mind your own business; we'll provide the tools'

@mikestaub web3 definitely corrupted the community term, and honestly, I'm so upset about it, but onwards we go. The biggest problem imho is too many conversations and not taking any action on them. People are overwhelmed by it all and they are just not helpful.

@rosiesherry talk is cheap and fun. Idk how to solve that problem? Action requires planning and commitment

@alexanderisora Easy to spin up Out of the box tools Not 100 different services to make it work Plenty of ways to make them financially stable Not dominated by big tech

@aaronoleary My community tech stack for Rosieland: - Discourse - Ghost - Slack - Waves (https://meetwaves.com/) - Butter.us - Whereby - Savannah (https://savannahhq.com/) There's other community tech stacks here: https://village.rosie.land/t/wha...

@daniel_chepenko I don't have any direct experience with this unfortunately. It sounds complicated, and I guess I would question the value of it, or perhaps find smaller scale experiments before committing to full scale cross-language community. You'd need moderation for each language (for example) 🤯 It's hard to comment further without further context, but as a mindset I think as community builders we need to ensure we provide great value for money. We should question our actions/projects accordingly.

@robhanna 1. What's different about building IRL communities vs online communities; and what's the same? Nothing beats IRL. It's amazing and creates connections, relationships and friends for life. In a way that online can't. But online is great for other things. And it's not that you can't create connection, it's just different. You don't have to have both, but it's amazing when it does happen. I also think that online can really enhance IRL, not by doing hybrid-events, but by connecting people before hand and as a consequence making the experience irl much better/deeper/meaningful. 2. What tools, techniques, resources do you find very helpful for building IRL communities? Not specific techniques, but most of my efforts for IRL has gone on ensuring that everyone has a great experience. That everyone feels included and seen. It's sadly amazing how many people go unseen at events when usually people do want to connect, it can just be difficult to know how. I've done a few local meetups and conferences (as part of an online community). Often online and irl end up merging to some extent and we should find better ways to help people connect offline through our online tools. Going to irl events can actually be quite scary and intimidating if you don't know anyone, I've often come away not speaking to anyone at various meetups I've attended. That's the worst. Helping people to get to know each other before an event, or sharing an attendee list of some sort before hand, encouraging people to buddy up, etc. Are all potentially beneficial things to do. When I did conferences, we made it a thing (and constantly communicated the fact) that we shouldn't leave people standing alone, that we are all responsible for checking in on people and helping them through the experience. It made a big difference to the community vibe.

@robhanna @rosiesherry Hi. I am new here. I would love your comments on our proposition. It is based on one hour long, small 8 to 12 person IRL events that have a host present to break the ice (single people algo matched and invited to pubs and restaurants.) We launch in about 3 to 5 weeks. getgather app is the ugly info website I put up (Help Wanted LOL!)

@andy_sorensen do you have a link?

@robhanna Hello Rob. Our (soon to be updated) information website is at : www.getgather.app Thanks for your interest.

@gusev honestly, there is so much on https://rosie.land, I'd start there :)

@codefreechris 1. create their own influencers: stop relying on big names to get traction, build people within 2. focus on outcomes rather than vanity metrics: the more you change people's lives, the more they will come back 3. understand that communities are forever evolving: what works now, might not work in the near future (but also, don't give up too easily and understand that many things take time to work).

@ashrahman It's a debate that may never end. There is no right or wrong, though. Discord was built for gamers, it has a different vibe. Slack is more professional and tech focused. Do what you feel happy with. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Personally, I used Discord for over a year and decided I hated it. The UX, the bots, the confusing threads, the spam, urgh. I started an indie founder community (where you get kicked if you don't participate 😅) we started on Discord, but interest soon was lost and people ended up saying they hated it. We moved to Slack and conversations massively increased and have stayed way up. https://twitter.com/rosiesherry/... I also have ethical concerns about Discord, which I wrote about here: https://village.rosie.land/t/i-d... People complain about Slack losing history, but I think that lack of history brings a sense of peace to members who don't necessarily want their conversations to exist forever. There are also tools like MeetWaves (https://meetwaves.com/) that allow you to capture Slack conversations. In addition to the huge amount of integrations, the DMs in Slack are highly under rated. (https://village.rosie.land/t/can...)

@rosiesherry Looks like we have a mutual feeling for discord. A great tool when gaming but nightmare for a community. Thanks for sharing insightful thoughts.

@nikhilbapna ❤️

@automatedtester Community is a team effort, I think it would be really hard to build an authentic community without the engineering expertise. The best communities are founded and started by the experts and I think it's a big reason communities start to fail, we need those 'passionate' experts to keep driving communities forward. However, the amount of 'operations' required to run a community often goes unnoticed, there's probably a lot of day to day community admin stuff that could be allocated to a community manager rather than an engineer. That would at least start to free up some of their time to perhaps work on more valuable or impactful things. And what should they avoid? Mostly being wasteful and vanity metrics (and in contrast focus on solving problems and being creative/refreshing in the work being done).

@jas801 Sure.

@archisman_das all of this comes back to community discovery, the research and understanding of your people. If you are unable to start conversations then that is an indication you need to do more work on what you could talk about, what kind of conversations will help your people move forward and what you want to be known for. This does take experimentation to get right and it's never static, you'll have to change and adapt over time. I tend to ask a lot of open ended questions on things that I think people should be thinking about. Then getting people's perspectives ends up being educational for all. However, really, it shouldn't end there, what will you do with all that information? How can you promote it more? How can you turn it into other content? etc.

@umut_sonmez Question whether you actually need a community, most people won't want to join a product community. But mostly, I recommend the Minimum Viable Community way. https://rosie.land/posts/a-guide...

@bethanavel I love this. I'd definitely go there and rant about tech bro and lack of diversity anonymously, I'm too scared to share my thoughts and experiences openly. 😅 Facebook groups has an anonymous feature and I've seen it work really well. It's scary talking real. People like to think we can be open, but often we can't. There is often a lot at risk, or we need that confidence to find ways to talk about things. Especially as a woman in tech, often I think it's all in my head (when it's not really, it's the self doubt creeping in). Personally, I'd embrace the fact that it is anonymous and the strengths that it gives you. Also to be frank, people are probably tired of networking these days. We're tired and have had too much of it and they are so hit and miss with value. The power of anonymity is that you could potentially have many interesting and spicy stories to share. I'd personally look at tapping into that and see how you can share them to a wider audience.

@_abhitweets think in terms of community flywheels https://rosie.land/tag/flywheels/

@anne_robertson thanks!

@richw build relationships, have conversations, become known for that person/company/community that does x. Do as much as you can in 'public'. People are put off this because it is slow, but the deeper you go, the more relevant you become and the more people will pay attention to you.