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.