Progressing Forward: A New Face for Talossa!

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

Keep Moving Forward:

A New Face for Talossa!

Forum-based communities have been declining across the internet for twenty years. Wittenberg is the heart of Talossan civic life, but the forum format has real limitations for attracting and retaining new members. New citizens face a wall of historical context, inside references, and ongoing debates into which they have no point of entry.  The official unofficial Discord has been a fun side community -- we should look into how we can integrate it (or an equivalent) into our civic life.  It turns out that saying "hi" on Discord is a first step some people like more than a forum post.

The data backs this up. We know that Wittenberg activity correlates with immigration applications, and we know that ghosting during the naturalization window is our biggest bottleneck. People drop off because they lose momentum, and momentum is easier to maintain when you can just pop into a Discord channel and see people talking than when you have to navigate a forum thread with six months of context you missed. Discord isn't a replacement for Wittenberg -- the Cosa isn't going to debate legislation in a chat room. But Discord can be where someone wanders in, says "hey, what's Talossa," and gets a human response in ten minutes.

We also need to be honest about what the forum format costs us in terms of the kind of citizen we attract. Right now, we self-select for people who are already comfortable with forums -- and that's an increasingly narrow slice of the internet-literate population. Plenty of people who would make great Talossans, who would write laws and learn the language and run for office, never get past the first look at Wittenberg because the format itself feels like homework. Let's broaden our horizons a little!