Globasa's very first ever live voice chat; On growing our community of speakers

Last night, we had our very first ever live voice chat in Globasa! Entirely unplanned. Three speakers and one listener. Perfect time to follow up on my post from last week.

As a follow-up, I wanted to highlight a comment made on that post by replying in a new post, so as to give the comment/reply more visibility.

Some kind of survey or questionnaire on how people decided to learn Globasa / join the community might be valuable, because while I agree that a communicative community is the most important thing, it was the large amount of content on youtube (+ people talking about it on Reddit) that convinced me that Globasa even had such a thing. 

Thank you again for your comments!

Honestly, aside from the fact that we're still a tiny community, I don't think a survey would tell us anything we don't already know.

But yes, I understand that the level of content we've developed has been helpful in attracting people, which is why I went along with it, even though I've always felt that it was more important to devote more time to stabilizing the language as well as encouraging people to spend less time in content and more time learning and using the language communicatively. 

The point I'm getting at is the difference between drawing people in and getting them to stay and become Globasa speakers. Yes, the Globasa content you came across might be effective in drawing people in, but if there is no community of Globasa speakers actually speaking to each other, I think the vast majority of people with an initial interest will not stick around.

Let me put it to you this way. There are over 8 billion humans on Earth, 8 billion. A tiny percentage of those people can surely find us if they have an interest in a project such as Globasa. The website and the activity happening here on Reddit from the start was surely enough for some people to take an interest. Even more so now, as the amount of content has grown. You're a case in point. And many like you will continue to knock on the door.

But that initial first impression could never sustain most people's interest for the long haul. The community needs to be alive, and not a community merely of content creators, but a community of speakers who talk to each other. That's the purpose of language to begin with, so it stands to reason that human nature's relationship to language, if applied in an auxlang community, would be a bottomless well of enthusiasm. 

I'm not familiar with the Bluesky scene, but it seems to me that the vast majority of Globasa interactions occur on the discord server where people unfamiliar with the language have no way of looking inside and seeing if the community is active.

Right. Well, the Bluesky community, or at least the activity there, might be growing. But yes, the Discord server isn't immediately visible, which is a major drawback. Bluesky is more visible. How could we give the community's engagement more visibility?

At any rate, at the very least, I've already made significant edits to the website's homepage that highlight these community developments, but it's one thing to read about it and another to actually see it with your eyes.

In addition, it occurs to me that instead of making more videos on Globasa itself, a YouTuber could showcase our content and resources, for example by making a video about the website, with its different resources, such as all the cool dictionary features. Eventually, perhaps a video showcasing the Discord and Bluesky scenes might be helpful.

So based on that I assume that Globasa mostly spreads via word of mouth or via people stumbling onto the existing content, and then deciding to join if they think the community is active enough (for example by looking at how frequently words are added via this subreddit).

It really doesn't matter how people are getting to us. The important thing is that they are; so I think more of our efforts should be devoted to developing a community that's alive, so that people will be motivated to start learning and to actively use the language within the community.