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Author of the post here. Happy to answer any questions!

I run a tech community on discord and I'm having a really hard time keeping it alive and well. We've been active for about 5 years and it's hard to keep a tight group of regulars around. Most people seem to come and go, a lot of them only interested in getting their issue solved. People who are interested in being part of a community, chatting with other people etc, don't seem to find what they're looking for and end up leaving. I have about a full renewal of the regulars every year or so where the old regulars become inactive and new people emerge but I can't seem to build a cohesive core of people and build a community culture around them beside the moderators. Have you managed this? How do you deal with retention and culture?

Thanks for sharing this. Without having any more context, here are some thoughts to consider:

- are there rituals that your community observes together?

- are there milestones community members can achieve that signify their progress or tenure?

- are you regularly acknowledging and celebrating folks who are contributing and adding a lot of value?

- have you tried casual events to connect members to one another?

- what is the unifying sense of identity that could/should bind everyone together? Can you lean into that?

Thanks for article, really helpful read.

When slack was created how many users joined on the first day, what was total number of users in ~3 month ?

First day? Maybe 5 people we harangued into joining?

As for the first three months, it depends on when we start counting (I'd say May represented the first month we actually started working on community deliberately), but had 59 by end of July.

You can see the growth curve here: https://res.cloudinary.com/dzello/image/upload/v1615409348/s...

This is exactly what I was looking for as reference point, thank you!

Nice article! You mention doing more events earlier, is there anything else you’d do differently?

Thanks! We definitely could've started with events sooner, IMO. The simple practice of getting folks together to meet and talk shop contributed to the sense of momentum overall and the interpersonal connections in particular.

I should note that all the events we've done to date have been small, and focused on our existing community. I think such focus made sense for us in year one, since we were building the community and the product at the same time. In other words, we didn't have the capacity to produce a broadly-focused event.

That said, the intimate vibe in the early days goes a long way toward engendering a sense of ownership and belonging among community members. I honestly think it's more meaningful to do smaller insider events more frequently in the early days, versus casting a brand net and potentially diluting the group’s nascent identity and culture norms.

Now that we're scaling up, I anticipate increasing the reach of our events as well. But that’s okay, as we have the team to support it on one hand, and on the other, the culture of the community is already well-defined.

Good luck!

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