We have just passed 100 subscribers (massive number I know haha) and I thought it would be a good opportunity to touch base and see what we should do here to increase engagement.
As most of you likely know, I am still a mod over at "the other site" and, though I have strong feelings about what they are doing as a company, I feel the community there has a lot of good people so I intend to continue to perform that role (the "glorified janitor" as one user kindly pointed out).
Having said that, I don't want this place to just be a mirror-universe version of r/judo. Lemmy and similar platforms are built around community first and foremost, and I would love to see that side of things grow.
Access to automated mod tools etc. is obviously much more primitive over here (feel free to leave suggestions if you have any) so automated posts and such are likely to be more difficult for now, but is there anything y'all wish we could do here?
Obviously one of the big draws of r/judo is the amazing wiki that Geschichtenerzaehler has put together and I have no intention of stealing that for here (though I'd be happy to copy it here if he was okay with it of course). We don't have anything like that, however I'd love to hear what you all think we could do to make this more than just a dumping ground of a few videos here and there.
Sorry for the lack of replies; I've been away helping run a tournament.
I definitely like the idea of a "technique of the week" or something similar. Perhaps we could do an over-arching "theme" per month or quarter and then the techniques can be related to that. So perhaps one period could be "ashi waza", another could be "turnovers" etc. and then each week the technique would be related to that.
I'm not sure if having weekly question threads (like WBW) would make sense yet due to the low traffic. I think it is better to just have people feel comfortable to ask questions directly here so they don't get lost or missed.
For competition lists I don't know what the best way to do that would be. Perhaps at this early stage it would be best to just make separate posts, but if they become too much then we could look at some sort of consolidation.
Club lists is a great idea. I wouldn't want just a large list of clubs from everywhere dumped here, but something where members can say "here is a club I go to or have visited that I recommend" would be a nice feature. Any thoughts on the best way to do this in Lemmy?
Weekly discussion threads would be nice. An older post by ConTheLibrarian also suggested posting a "technique of the week" which I would be interested in seeing.
For technique of the week? Maybe alternate between one tachiwaza and one newaza technique every week, or even do one of each per week. And in each post have a demonstration video and some discussion prompts like what do people like about that technique, what's most challenging, what are some good cues to remember, if this is your tokui waza give some advice, etc.
For weekly discussion threads, maybe something lighthearted like stories from training. I don't think we need to have a discussion thread for questions, I think they can be posted straight to the community since it's not super active at this point.
White Belt Wednesday was super helpful to me on the subreddit. And though I'll be testing for my yellow in a few weeks (!!!) I have a feeling something like that would continue to be valuable well into the future. And we'll definitely need a wiki of some sort eventually if we want to keep growing, whether that means copying over the old one or creating something new. Those things are a huge part of why so many subreddits were invaluable to people.
Other than that, keep on trucking! 100 subscribers seems like a small milestone, but building these sorts of communities takes time. If you build it, they will come, so on and so forth.
Good luck with the yellow belt!
I'm looking into bots for lemmy so I could start up something similar, but in the meantime don't hesitate to ask any questions!