I joined the Fortran Discourse on the 15th May 2020, ten days after Milan’s original post. This community is an enormous success as we are more than 1150 registered users on the Discourse! (In fact only ~420 users have read at least one post this last Quarter).
Of course, things have changed in three years as the community was growing. To resume my experience I would say that:
- the first year I was eagerly reading all messages,
- the second year it became impossible to read all messages in a topic,
- during the third year I began to read only the topics whose title interested me (and I often have no time to read each post even there). It is partly due to the amount of posts, but also due to the fact that a lot of experts have now joined the Discourse and some topics are hard for me to follow because of their very high technical level on certain aspects of the language or other subjects. Well, that is a success for the community!
But that scale change probably impact the way we interact. My experience is that friendly discussions are now occurring more on the private message (PM) side. In PM you can digress in many directions, and talk more directly from human being to human being (telling who you really are beyond your avatar, joking, etc.). In a populated public Discourse, it becomes a problem because people interested by the main topic may be naturally annoyed by long digressions or friendly discussions between two people. Finally, we more often censor ourselves to avoid polluting a discussion thread… That is a drawback of success!
Concerning digressions, we can do something: if we begin to digress from the main subject of a topic, we should think about opening a new topic and redirect people there.
Maybe we could also add an “Introduce myself” (“Presentation”, “Who am I”…) post category where new members could introduce themselves (if they desire). That is generally considered a good practice in a forum to present oneself before asking a question. Then you appear to be more than an avatar. But don’t forget you can also present yourself quickly in your Discourse profile (it will be shown when one clicks on your avatar).
Finally, consider also that the community is not restricted to the Discourse. It is really great to see people collaborating on GitHub on new Fortran tools or writing Fortran papers together, or working on translations or documentation, etc. Each collaboration can be a pleasure. There is so much to do, whatever your level! Working together can help creating human links and more friendly relationships. Building commons together brings a great satisfaction.
Long live the Fortran-lang community!