@pratik @vasta

My first thought also was, if I wanted to be around people like me, I wouldn’t have moved more than 8,000 miles from where I was born.

🤣🤣🤣

That said, I don’t think I would have stuck around here if I hadn’t found a group of people I had some affinity with. There aren’t a lot of people here like me (for some definition of “like me”—for instance, there’s no-one here/active I know in person or from previous online activities, though there are plenty of white males from the US), but there are a lot of interesting people not like me, and some of us have shared interests or characteristics—Sameer and I both attended Georgetown, William and I both trained as historians and write poetry (one of us far better than the other ;-) ), and Craig and I grew up in the same county, for three examples. I have a wide range of things I find interesting at a degree necessary to sustain a conversation, from the web and Mac software to history, archaeology and architecture to the diverse nature of the world writ large to gardening, so it’s been easy for me to find multiple sets of people here that have some shared interest—but not everyone necessarily has this same breadth of interests. If all we did here is talk about cricket and knitting, no matter how much joy and passion it brought to people involved in those conversations, I wouldn’t want to stay, because there’s no shared interest for me (and I think, because there does seem to be such a volume of conversation about software in various forms and ways, and the politics of the web and social media, people do miss seeing that there are all these other, but smaller, conversations about a whole host of diverse topics, so they may feel like this isn’t a place for them. One way to help combat that is to more regularly expand Discover’s tagmoji—cricket, for instance, should be promoted from suggestion to production, IMO, and maybe knitting/sewing, too; I’ve seen a lot of that lately—and we should feel out what other sub-communities seem to be coalescing).