This community is pretty quiet. I thought I’d share some ideas to get people talking.

People love talking about their work. Worldbuilding, like conlanging, is often a lonely hobby. Unless you have the artistic or literary talent to draw people in, most will not be interested. Sadly, this often includes other conworlders/conlangers. I know I’m guilty of ignoring the work of others. Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to turn your own posts into prompts encouraging others to share similar ideas from their own projects. I was kind of expecting people to discuss their own alien child rearing strategies and kinship systems in this post I made a while ago, but I probably should have ended it with a prompt to open the discussion.

Free-form roleplaying is something I found extremely fun, as it allows others to explore their fellow conworlders’ projects in an “in-universe” manner. It’s also helpful for brainstorming ideas for your own projects. The Multiverse Inn on the CBB forum is a good example.

A similar concept for conlangs specifically is Analysis swap, where one person plays the role of a (possibly monolingual) speaker of one of their conlangs and the other participants play field researchers or language learners trying to tease out the grammar of the language by asking questions or eliciting responses. Here and here are my own attempts, though I got much more into the roleplaying than the linguistic aspect.

Back when I was on /r/worlbuilding I tried initiating what I thought would be a fun game of worldbuilding mad libs, where you had to fill in the blanks in a way that mad sense in your own setting, but the mods deleted it in short order.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I want to add that I think the voting system may prevent some people from responding. On a traditional forum, if you want to register your opinion you had to comment. Sure sometimes the comments weren’t always substantive, but they arguably provided more interaction than a simple upvote or downvote. On Lemmy (and Reddit) one can feel like they’re “interacting” with content simply by voting without contributing to the discussion. Perhaps I’m wrong on this, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    Thanks for this! The community is pretty quiet and I do wish I had the bandwidth to help it grow more. You’re right that it’s a lonely hobby. A community where people want to get super specific really benefits from being on a larger platform unfortunately. You need a large-ish crowd to find more than one of us who obsesses over the same sort of details.

    Until the fediverse gets to that size, my approach has been to give more of myself to the others in the community than I might on a reddit sub that is orders of magnitude larger. When I do have time to browse other peoples’ writing, I make an effort to meet them on their level, read their work, and ask questions that, with any luck, they’re excited to talk about. It might encourage more of the same, but hopefully at least it makes people feel rewarded for posting, while we grow.

    I like the idea of more collaborative posts to get people talking. If you wanted to host a freeform RP thread here that aims to offer a more dynamic expository function, I would be delighted to help however I can and maybe join in. I don’t know what my mod-ship counts for around here, but it gets my stupid little rubber stamp. A worldbuilding mad libs thread is a cool concept too, and people might find it easier to dive into that, if only for cheap thrills.

  • TwoCupsofSugar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    I’ve definitely shied away from posting anything on my own projects as engage on those sorts of things tends to be incredibly low even when art is involved and tbh i do this as a hobby not a job so I’m not really that dedicated on making my own work overly presentable. I’ve found I generally prefer to have discussion on a specific topic rather than a share your own idea type prompt. So for example, what would art be like for a telepathic species be like? ect. At least that generally the stuff i prefer to interact with most of the time.

  • Zonetrooper@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Some of it is definitely phrasing. (Just referencing your recent post again, I initially thought it was supposed to be a “prompt” post, where others would be asked to submit their own ideas as well, but after reading it I came away with the impression it was a lore post from your world.)

    But some of it is also just… like you say, people love to show off their own stuff! I’ve tried to overcome that impetus by actually reading and trying to provide thoughtful questions on others’ work, though I’ll admit I’m not always the best at it either.

    In previous communities, driving engagement (particularly with others’ posts) has always been a tricky thing. What works for some people, doesn’t for others; at one point, we had a user who asked others to provide two responses to others’ ideas for each thing of their own they submitted. Some people liked it, feeling it encouraged engagement; others did not, because they felt it encouraged very simple, low-quality responses to meet the “quota” - or discouraged them from posting their own things at all!

    I do actually like some of the ideas you’ve proposed here. Some of them may struggle in what I will call the “content aggregator site” format (i.e., as opposed to forums where you had continuous running threads). But that’s not a knock on the ideas, nor does it mean they’re not worth giving a shot.