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

@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...

@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).

@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.

@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 @vincent_meco I avoid anything to do with web 3 atm.

@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.

@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.

@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...

@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

@alexanderisora @rosiesherry I have the prototype MVP built... This answers a question i was going to ask... what's missing in the current formats...?

@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.

@asthakor51 there is no best, there is only context. Mostly, it depends where your target members tend to hang out.

@maria_kono There's many things at play here. Tools like Savannah (https://savannahhq.com/), Burb (https://burb.co/) and Common Room (https://www.commonroom.io/) make it easier to track community data. They are all new to the market and I'm sure they will evolve over time. I think data from these tools can partially help prove our worth, but we also have to be careful about not obsessing purely with the data. The more we can prove that growth, success, ideas, innovation, relationships, conversations, etc stem from community then the more people will actually see the huge benefits of community. Though I think we need to figure this out better. I feel like there is so much waste in community. So much value that happens in the relationships and conversations that goes unnoticed. The more we can work with this kind of stuff, be creative around it, find ways to collaboratively work with members and other team mates to make stuff happen, then this is where change happens. And ultimately, we want change, not necessarily vanity metrics on the number of conversations or upvotes. We have to believe in community: having to constantly justify ourselves is unhealthy for everyone. I don't think most people truly believe in community, if they did they wouldn't make it the first thing they cut. Business don't practice what they preach: and it comes across in their actions. For example, when ROI is calculated, despite community being 'people powered' all the talk is about ROI for the business and totally excluding how they give back to the people, industry and ecosystem. (https://village.rosie.land/t/cal...) Community is not marketing: but perhaps we can massively reduced the marketing spend by focusing on community. I certainly built my business with zero ad spend and with a pure focus on helping and serving the community. It is possible, we need to create more examples of it.