Ask HN: How do you build and grow decentralised online communities?

Another user just signed up on https://twtxt.net/ and posted their first post! -- But as this thread's question states; I would really feel like I'v accomplished something positive in the world if just one person spun up their own instance! We as a society need to start thinking about taking back control and ownership of our data and the digital footprint we leave behind. Its yours!

They grow organically. One person finds it valuable and tells another person who joins, and so on.

Twtxt is a neat format. I personally don’t like the lack of new lines, but that’s part of its simplicity.

Pretty cool, reminds me of feedweave - https://github.com/feedweave/feedweave-ui

The founders of reddit said they used to create fake accounts and have conversations with themselves when the site was starting to make it look like there was activity.

I think growing a community consists of consistency, inclusivity, and really driving discussions. Paying close attention to users.

I have a NNTP, although so far nobody joined (except for a few testing messages, and some of my own stuff) and nobody mirrored it onto their own servers (although I haven't yet implement the ability to forward from my computer, and IHAVE currently isn't enabled on my service; I can fix this though if people will want it in future). There has also been the suggestion to also include a web interface to configure and operate it for users who use web interfaces, as well as having the NNTP service for users who use NNTP. There is also the idea to support Markdown, which I also think is helpful, although there are two considerations that must be made: (1) Only articles with a "Content-type: text/markdown" header should be interpreted as Markdown; otherwise, it might mess up a display due to using things that isn't supposed to do. (2) It might be helpful to use a subset of Markdown without HTML features, to make it more readable even if you do not have Markdown on your computer.

Of course OTOH; the _real_ question is how do we form decentralised communities of which github.com/prologic/twtxt is designed for? My main goals are to make it as simple as possible for _anyone_ (even non-tech folks) to spin up their own instance.