Reply To: Some Insights on How We’re Doing

[Peter DeLegge]

On Vst0nE said

nice Peter, great progress, hope users from previous deals location will be able to allocate this forum

It greatly helps when people in the group tell others. That’s really the key to this community growing. That and participating. If you take out 2 developers and 3 accounts I set up for testing, I think our count of real community members during this beta test period is 86 people. But the reality is, more than half of the people I registered have never made a post. So getting started is the hard part. Once that happens, I think people will see that while it’s different than Cakewalk Forums, or whatever forums they’re familiar with, it has the same core functionality — it actually has a lot more functionality.

I created the “Cake to LM Equivalent Links” to make it easier for those who came from Cakewalk Forums to be able to find the similar forums here. Again, the hard part is getting acclimated and making that first post. But there’s still a bunch of people from Cakewalk Forums that I greatly enjoyed that still haven’t come here. And I actually took a look at Cakewalk Forums yesterday and it’s desolate. Not many people aren’t posting there. I really wish we could get more of the group that shared their music over here, because that group meant a lot to me. They were really supportive and encouraging of others, and I really wanted to take that and build on that, because of how much that encouragement meant to me personally and how much I enjoy encouraging others.

Before my injury, I was a perfectionist musician. It has made it very difficult to accept that I can’t play like I once did or even at a level I’d consider passable and my voice was never very good, so sharing anything with my voice on it publicly was embarrassing and hard to get used to. But I’ve made some progress in my playing in the past 3 years. My timing has improved a bit (not a lot, but a little). Having that group of people encouraging me and then encouraging others — one musician who PMed me that she wanted to collaborate with me — was this very talented guitarist. And I think she connected with me because tendinitis stopped her from being able to play. We connected due to that experience and I thought it was a beautiful thing how people can be mutually supportive. I really want that to be a big part of this community. Yes, I realize it’s deals that brings everyone aboard and keeps them coming back, but what really made Cakewalk Forums special to me was how people were encouraging and friendly to one another.  When I shared that motivating factors behind me wanting to do this, it really was about that as the foundation. I wanted to strip out the developer forum owners doing screwed up things and focus on how to make a community that lifts up people, that encourages people, that celebrates music and is an environment that does all it can to facilitate that.

All of those other communities that people go to — they focus on one thing, making money for the forum owners. And yes, my expertise is digital marketing, I know how to do that. But that isn’t the driving force of this community. My big goals for this community are about the emotional side more than deals. Yes, we’re going to make this site an amazing research tool that removes the bias of developer-owned forums. But more importantly, this community will focus on areas that sites focused purely on profit don’t care about, the human side of this passion. We’re going to ensure this community doesn’t become toxic, because I know that’s incredibly important to me and many others. But it takes a group. It takes people being active at this site and in reaching out to others to make it grow. Right now, we’re seeing things move very slowly. So even messaging friends here and encouraging them to be active helps. Any efforts reaching out to friends from Cakewalk Forums — and any other forums is appreciated.

LinkedMusicians Founder. Your friend who keeps the beat.

Check out my music. 

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