It does feel kind of slower than before but the site was never really a torrent of activity. Imo that is fine as long as it exists and posters get to find each other and chat at their own pace.
Would not expect a change of format to affect the activity much. Sure, platforms like 'cord cater to the current audience more, innudating them with pings, pops and boops from a hundred chats, but the core of this website's users probably have the same reservations against those.
Online social interactions being funneled into a handful of proprietary closed platforms owned by shady people whose #1 job is continuously multiply the shareholders' value is generally an unhealthy trend.
This place goes against it and that already merits it existing. Whether there are 70 members present or 40 does not change that.
>>120113
Yeah, precisely. This only furthers the notion of how important it is for a place such as this one to exist, to serve as an alternative.
On the topic of activity levels, the options seem to be:
a) Let things sort themselves organically, come what come may.
Almost all altchans have what people often consider to be low activity, that should not be a surprise. Even 4chan's trends aren't positive.
That said, there is no ISO standard on what PPH or user count should be. It may go up, it may go down, it may fluctuate based on the season, the holidays, the phase of the moon, the gas prices, whatever. Just bee yourself and keep lurking or, better yet, posting.
b) Encourage more activity from among the existing userbase: come up with events of sorts, possibly on schedule; draw-a-thons are a good example )though anecdotally I never partook because it felt like a commitment and there was never free time. Also commending one poster but not the other for the work would've felt unfair and commenting under every work would take a ton of time; hopefully others fare better. As a sidenote, the one mechanic possibly worth adopting from social media is a way to react to post without typing in a response, i.e. emojis/reactions. A simple way to signal to a poster that their post evoked something in the readers. Good luck actually coding it and then preventing it being gamed in some way though.)
Maintaining or increasing the activity is a communal effort. Yeah we are lazy, at times we have no energy or ideas of our own, but let's support those who do, when they do.
c) Consider being more open to the concept of inviting more new blood; be it through suggesting that existing users invite their buddies or something more organized/systematic. Let us ask ourselves: *how did the current core users discover the board?* We didn't just spawn here coalescing out of aether. Can we do more of that?
x)This point isn't something one can just will into existence, nor it is something that can be asked of a person but is something to consider: communities this size are often held afloat by a single entertainer (of a handful of). Just someone who isn't only passionate about the community or whatever the community happens to revolve around, but also has the time and energy for it (that's really all it takes, charisma is barely tertiary in the formula for success here).
Also worth bearing in mind that as someone else aptly put in another thread a month or so back, anthros alone aren't enough to warrant an entire board (though there's definitely plenty of avenues of discussions there, e.g. the individual species threads). They are more of a flavor and a spin that we can put on other topics. Art, music, hobbies, pets, travel and so forth.
Reposting art from xitter is also beneficial for sure; not every one visits social media, or has the time to sift through the feed, memorize artists' names or discover new ones themselves.
Doesn't have to even be explicitly relevant either. E.g. those posts by an anon who did a daytrip to SF and posted photos are technically off-topic but give the place a bit more character. Behind every post there is a person, and knowing how soulless mainstream social media are, getting users to share their accomplishments, worries, memories with likeminded individuals on a platform that won't have them slid off the screen in a neverending stream of status updates from 3298744 faceberg 'furriends' is probably a good idea. Basically /dailylogging/ could use more attention and could serve as a handy teambuilding (please excuse the corpospeak) thread.
Stopping here before the rambling gets any more incoherent.
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