Any chance of getting a community for rural areas set up? Maybe c/Outback or c/Bush or similar. For topics specifically related to rural areas
I think in the long term if we continue growing, it would be best to separate this into communities for each state/territory, at least the large ones. Such as r/Vic and r/NSW over on Reddit. But while it's still quietish here, I think a single jumbo community for basically all non urban areas would be fine
And another:
Would we be able to get an Australian Trains or Australian Transport community running? I don't think it's worthwhile creating train related communities for every city, so this would essentially serve as a transport community for everywhere else in Aus outside the major cities.
I think Melbourne and Sydney are still deserving of their own communities, but !BrisbaneTrains@aussie.zone is fairly inactive, so if the over abundance of PT related communities is a concern, I'd be open to polling the few members over there on whether they'd be in favour of closing it off to new posts and redirecting people to the AusTrains community instead
The idea of a general Aus transport community would be fun. It would need one or two people to put their hands up to really drive that community though. I've found most of the time these specialty communitys are failing because theres no one delivering a baseline of posts.
I'd like to, but I'm a little busy with the two main communities i'm involved with and the third i'd like to post more into is RTFA, but that community is probably going to be slow moving by its nature, as it entails a fair amount of reading before social actions are taken.
I tried to accommodate for WA as a whole with the one community in the beginning. I'd not be keen to separate out country WA from the metro, theres so many connections between country and city, i'd rather emphasise those where i can, instead of delineating an already over emphasised and arbitrary social/cultural boundary.
An idea for a community could be an Australian Business News community, it could replace ausfinance or even a rename of that community. It makes the possible topics a little broader because you could pile industry specific news like mining, agri, or health industry news into that.
Alternatively your idea of a c/bush could roll agri industry news into that.
I was trying to aim for 1 post a day in c/MelbourneTrains for a while, but I haven't been going out on the trains as much as I used to, and aren't seeing as many cool things as I once did. I still try to keep up 1 post a week minimum, preferably at least 1 news or similar type article + 1 photograph
c/SydneyTrains is largely being kept on life support by @zero_gravitas@aussie.zone and @WaterWaiver@aussie.zone (thank you both, I appreciate you), and I try to post occasionally, but I have only visited Sydney once and mostly took photos of mundane things everybody potentially interested in the community will have seen dozens or hundreds of times, so I don't really post those. Mostly just news articles and opinion pieces, occasionally YouTube videos or video essays where I stumble upon one I enjoy
c/BrisbaneTrains is a lot more complicated. I wasn't th eone who requested that, but did volunteer to help moderate. But I dont live in Brisbane, have never been to Brisbane, and haven't the faintest clue how their public transport network works, so my ability to post is largely restricted to articles, which I don't get many of because I don't know anything about it and haven't been interested enough I suppose. And nobody else has really posted anything there
I'd really love to see some people asking questions and wanting to learn about aspects of (particularly Melbourne's) train networks. I've got... Some... knowledge that I could share, about various things, but most of the engagement in melb trains seems to come from people browsing local who see something and go "huh, neat. Upvote", so it feels a bit like an echo chamber
I like discussion and debate, too. There was some good debate on a post about hydrogen buses in c/MelbourneTrains a while back. I didnt really participate because I just didn't have enough knowledge about the pros and cons of hydrogen as a vehicle power source to comment, but it was good to see and I'd love more of that
If an AusTransport community were to be created, I'd definitely aim for at least a post a week, which would still make it more active than some other communities such as AusTech
Chux Baku, I didn't think I was doing much :)
AusTransport sounds nice. But what happens to the old communities, to avoid people using those? I don't know if it's possible to lock them and leave a notice, or unlist them somehow?
Nah, you're like half the posts in SydneyTrains, thanks for keeping it active!
Imo, SydneyTrains and MelbourneTrains have enough activity to justify keeping. BrisbaneTrains is pretty much dead, so we could either just leave it, or run a poll and if everyone was in agreeance, leave a redirect notice to this new AusTransport community and ask people to post their instead
As for the potential crossover between Melb/Syd and AT, I would view it like how there's Sydney, Melbourne, brisbane, etc, communities as well as an Australia community. Usually things specifically related to cities or states with their own communities would go in those communities, but sometimes whoever's doing the posting thinks they're significant enough to be relevant to the Australia wide comm, too