Since traditional forums are dead, how are you approaching building an online community?

For Indie Hackers, my approach was to build an audience first. Specifically, my steps were…

1. Find a topic that people online are passionate about reading and discussing. In my case, this was developers bootstrapping companies as solo founders, and I found these people on Hacker News.
2. Do a better job than the status quo putting together a blog on this topic. In my case, I interviewed founders and asked questions that got them to tell better stories than they were telling elsewhere. The key was that I mostly knew what people wanted to read (based on their discussions on HN) rather than having to guess.
3. Promote the blog, and use the resulting traffic to build an audience via an email list.

Only after that did I try to create an online community, which I did by building a forum, seeding it with interesting discussions every day (me talking to myself), and sending out links to the conversations to my mailing list every week, alongside links to the interviews I was publishing.

Of course this isn't the only way to do it. Another way I like is to start small. A party with 5 people might sound like a failure, but if the venue is small enough, it actually might be great. Instead of going with a forum right off the bat, why not try a small chat group on WhatsApp or something?

Then there are some basics. For example:

• It's impossible to build a community around something that people don't naturally enjoy discussing or doing together.
• It's very difficult to maintain membership in a community if the topic it's built on isn't something people do frequently, or if it's something that people graduate from and never look back.
• As the leader, you need to be doing almost all of the recruiting and leading of discussions in the early days. It's mostly hustle. Fake it til you make it. It takes many many months to get to the point where the community can sustain itself.

This is interesting question, and I am sure many struggle building niche UGC on their sites. Maybe @csallen can tell his journey on how he went about building content for IH.

As a side question, does anyone know a directory that lists all high quality communities to be inspired by?

IMHO - when you build a forum, you still need to create other channels to help it grow. A newsletter, Twitter, etc.

It's really hard and most people give up when they don't see quick results. The trick is to keep writing about useful and interesting things, even if it only a handful of you.

I love forums because they can provide such useful information that carefully written content never does. It's a shame there aren't more of them.

Of course IH is great :D But also my whole Ministry of Testing business was built on the foundation of a community forum. I started on Ning (yuck...and it was 2007), but now it lives on a Discourse set up.

I'd second what Rosie said, you have to keep making content on the forum and working on ways to get people in from other channels, and ultimately I imagine it's a long slog. I'm going to be trying something similar myself soon and I'm anxious about running into some of the same problems you've encountered. Do you have any advise on some things thay have gone well? Also, how do you feel about discourse generally?