5 years of maintaining India's largest dev community on the web

I have been part of the r/developersIndia community team since its inception in Jan 2020. A lot has happened since we started this initiative, this post is my personal collection of some learnings as someone behind the scenes along with my failures, community’s successes & some tips for folks thinking to build a community of their own or well for folks who are just interested in what went behind the scenes.

• Disclaimers
• Brief history of developersIndia
• Acknowledgements
• What was the vision?
• Where did I fail?
• Where did we succeed?
• Internet forums for the rest of us
  • Why so many pedantic rules?
  • Why so much moderation?
• The act of giving back
• How it feels to be a community builder?
  • Everything becomes personal
  • Everyone expects someone else to do the thing
  • It’s a full-time job
  • You can’t listen to everyone
• Should you build a community of your own?
• Should you volunteer in a community?
• What’s next?

Disclaimers

1. I have a self-appointed title, Community Lead, I am a volunteer, all volunteers inside any community are builders of that community. If you do this as your day job, I have huge respect for you, let’s chat sometime?
2. At the time of publishing this post, developersIndia is in the top 10 programming communities, sitting at more than a million members as reported by Reddit.
3. Whatever good has happened with developersIndia, it’s all because of the community members, I was probably just a class monitor¹ :)

Brief history of developersIndia

1. developersIndia forum was started in Jan 2020 by one of my college friend, Sid with the simple motivation of Having a place for us Indian devs on the internet.
2. 2–3 days later, a discord server was also created to enable real-time discussions.
3. Over the next couple of months after inception, the community growth was almost exponential, the rest is history.

If I remember correctly I was invited after a couple of days to be part of the initial team, after the Subreddit was created. Back then, it was not sure how will I be able to contribute actively, but I was there to help out with whatever I could.

Fast-forward 5 years, we are still here. Personally, I have taken longish breaks (while being behind the scenes working with Sid) to settle up my career first before giving back to the community, I have also spent complete days & weeks doing just community work.

To define simply, developersIndia is a big group of software-tech enthusiasts in India, in technical terms, it’s a public, free and will-driven forum-based community for devs in India.

• public & free: Anyone can join, no restrictions.
• will-driven: There are no guarantees for anything.
• forum-based: Discussion oriented, not social media.

A lot has happened since these 5 years, I have been there to witness all different kinds of trends in the community, all the good moments as well as the bad ones.

Acknowledgements

Adding this section in the very start so it’s clear that developersIndia has been a team effort, and would like to personally thank all these folks for contributing behind the scenes!

• Sid, for sending me that one random WhatsApp message to join the team in 2020 🤜🏽🤛🏽
• Somraj Saha for building & taking care of the wiki in its early days and being a thoughtful senior to brainstorm ideas with.
• All the active forum volunteer team members ², u/LinearArray, u/sid741445, u/noThefakedevesh, u/ironman_gujju, u/kacchalimbu007, u/Far_Philosophy_8677, u/Complete-Bonus-428, u/n1rvanaisrael, u/Hackinet, u/sybarite29, u/X_mysterio, u/ankit0208, u/Viper3110, u/harshcasper.
• All folks who were part of the team but left indefinitely, thanks!
• Every member of the community, who has been with us since the start, or joined us recently, you all are the reason we are here today. Thank you. <3

Not all of you maybe active today, but y’ll have been a part of the community at some point in time, and I appreciate your time & effort in making developersIndia what it is today.

Everything past this line are my personal perspectives with a mix of facts.

What was the vision?

A lot of senior community leaders might beg the question, that all communities need a mission, a vision. However, we (Me & Sid) came to a realization that goals need to be fluid and need to change with time, just like humans learn new things & change every day.

You cannot (& shouldn’t) expect a small group of volunteers to steward a million member community to a specific goal. It’s bonkers, now that I think about it. We are not a foundation.

The good thing with forum-based community approach is that your work as a volunteer is reduced to a minimum, since the communities become self-sustaining (if they pick up), and the only thing you need to do is to make sure the community is safe. Every thing else that can or will happen, is just an initiative that anyone can take up.

At the core level, the most basic need was to have a safe space for all the software tech nerds in India. This means folks should be able to ask for help, share their wins, post what they are working on, etc. you get the idea. It’s the only thing that has been consistent since the start, and I guess we have sort of achieved that.

Where did I fail?

Safe to say, that I am not really a role model for “leadership” and honestly, I don’t think anyone is, some humans adapt & succeed in that role, some don’t. Leadership is accidental; you don’t become a leader just because you want to. It’s a result (or rather, I say a consequence) of your drive & passion for creating something.

Having said that, here are some of my failures as a community lead:

1. Not starting a volunteer program as soon as the community was created. We delayed it for over 1.5 years since the forum’s inception (the community grew exponentially in that period). It was potentially excluding any motivated folks who wanted to join the team. A bummer decision, although now we have an all-year open volunteer program.
2. I ignored the wiki for a long time (launched in 2022). It had a lot of potential. I guess the entry barrier was high, not a lot of people write.
3. I wasn’t able to figure out how to make the people in the community feel closer to each other, i.e, what makes a community is the unsaid bond between the members, this is very straightforward to achieve in a physical setting. I am not sure if this is even possible in an online world. The same goes for the volunteer team, I wasn’t able to make them feel like they are part of something big.
4. In terms of initiatives, I wasn’t able to give (or think) much back to the underrepresented folks in the community. Two³ big women in tech groups shut down, in spite of whatever the fuck big tech is doing, I still believe there’s a gap to fill & I am not sure how to aid on filling that gap.
5. Not banning memes early. No matter how good memes are for engagement⁴ or just healthy distractions, they overshadow the more important stuff in the community. We rolled out an indefinite break to memes, which was intended to be a temporary change, but we saw almost no negative change on community’s engagement after introducing it.

Where did we succeed?

1. The community is mainstream so it’s hard to ignore what’s going on here for anyone, ultimately attracts a big chunk of lovers & haters⁵. The community is big enough to be in news, social media and github issue threads.
2. A lot of engineering leaders from various domains like, Cloud, AI, Cybersecurity, Open-source in the Indian dev community choose to spend their time with us via AMA sessions, ultimately contributing to the overall ecosystem. I would like to thank each one of our guests, we appreciate your time and effort for giving back to the community and I hope my mails & messages were not annoying :)
3. If you see the history of I made this posts, builders & makers are greatly appreciated in the community. I encourage all the builders to use developersIndia as a platform to launch their products⁶.
4. The forum casts a somewhat real reflection of the Indian software tech industry. Say it depressing or great, it’s the truth. The community is a great place to get a sense of what’s going on in the industry, and everyday it’s becoming more and more diverse, thanks to everyone for sharing their stories.

Internet forums for the rest of us

I believe this section is needed for the sake of my mind, as the line between different places people hangout on the Internet has become very thin, so here goes.

Forums are not social media, at least not the way you think, you can ask questions, get answers, and have discussions. Your identity may or may not matter, it’s the thoughts & opinions of a group that matter. Forums are the place where you won’t see the concept of followers & the billion dollar creator economy.

That’s why they are a great place to drive community based discussions, your favorite YT channel is not actually a community in the sense, that your opinions in the comments section don’t matter in comparison to the person who posted the video.

Just because they are forums, they don’t get excluded from the bad side of the internet. Bad actors exist everywhere.

Forums are not new, but they are new to the young generation who wasn’t around during the birth of internet forums (including me). In present times, the top 3 products that have dived into building forums & fairly succeeded are:

1. Reddit
2. StackExchange
3. Discourse

Next, let’s try to address some of the common questions that I often see in forum based communities.

Why so many pedantic rules?

Because that’s how forums survive. All forum oriented platforms StackExchange, HackerNews, Reddit have these pedantic rules.

Your freedom of speech doesn’t matter in forum based dynamics. If you don’t like the rules of a private/public niche forum, you are free to leave. The following XKCD comic sums it up perfectly.

In the case of Reddit, at least, the Subreddit creators & moderators set the rules. A possible argument to this is Isn’t that … dictatorship?, the way I can answer this is imagine you invent a game, to make the game fair, you set rules with time you understand that some rules are not fair or require modifications because the 100 times you played this game since its inception, people have found ways to ruin the game so you change them, the same goes for forums. It has nothing to do with politics.

Why so much moderation?

Let’s say you live in a society, your society has a park. And a rule is set up so that if your pet poops in the park, you have to clean it up. If you don’t clean it up, you get fined. You don’t pay the fine, you get banned from the park, you see where I am going with this?

Power Hungry is a term that is used a lot, like we get some kick out of banning people. We don’t. Every time I see someone generating blatant hate, directly violating the Code of Conduct, my heart breaks, all 5 years in the community & people still haven’t learned to use the web productively.

The existence of Code of Conduct & Rules aren’t a new thing, they have existed as long as the Internet, different groups that exist on the web have their own standards that need to be met if you want to be part of that group, consequences usually involve temporary or permanent expulsions, social media has ruined this concept by providing some kind of pseudo freedom and made things worse.

It’s hilarious to say the least, cancel & hate culture are the two most stupid things that have come out of the web and anyone who has participated in it, needs to go back to school or book an appointment with their therapist.

Dealing with such folks is always mentally draining. In spite of strict rules, things always go south. I will go ahead and say all major social media apps need strong moderation, I look at comments on instagram reels and how subtly sexist & racist people are is astonishing, I guess its bad side of the human nature, since you can’t be racist face to face, some choose to do it on the internet, and you can thank them for ruining the internet for the rest of us.

I personally have no sympathy for internet trollers, never will. You can set up your own website, say and do whatever the fuck you want, but not in a community I hang out in. Additionally, ain’t nobody got time for helping you fix your behavior.

The act of giving back

Here’s something everyone in the industry need to understand, people just don’t willingly help others, and why would they? There’s nothing to gain, and always something to lose (time & energy). I believe we seriously lack the act of giving back in our unregulated industry. This goes for all levels of folks, juniors, seniors, everyone. Forget the noise from thought leaders for a second, I am talking about you, the people who actually make the industry, industry.

But bhupesh, my favorite INSERT WHOEVER creates awesome educational content, yes maybe but how long do you think they can keep doing this? To make things sustainable, they need to make money (or at least gain some sort of reward from it), and that’s where the act of giving back, stops. Not to forget, human creativity is limited, you can’t keep giving back over & over again for free, everyone has a limit.

I mean look at our favorite thing for the last couple of years, “Open-source”, the era of FOSS-marketed/enabled products is on the rise, folks have started to realize to make things scalable, they have to make money and get some free work on the side. The sudden realization from FOSS maintainers that they need to make money, is a clear indication that the act of giving back is not sustainable, the ecosystem is still divided on people building things just because they were passionate about solving something, and projects that get started by large corporations to reduce their costs.

On the flip side, the act of giving back requires strong motivation, you are not in wrong, if you are stable in your tech career and the only thing you worry about is your immediate family & friends, heck even I often don’t care about what & how the rest of the world in the tech is doing, but every now & then I realize how alone we all are, especially in a domain which has 0 rules & infinite chaos, everyone feels overwhelmed at some point in their career, especially newcomers, I can’t even imagine how the new generation is going to tackle the upcoming GenAI x Software Engineering era.

If at any point in your career, you do decide to give back, I recommend contributing via platforms that are public (search indexable & free to join), be it answering a question on StackOverflow or Reddit, or even just sharing your knowledge in a blog post. You never know who you might help.

I would discourage joining private, invite only or hidden communities (talking about invite only discord & other variations), they are not sustainable, and they are not helping anyone with all that locked-in insights. For people who build them, you wanna change the world? Do it publicly. Sitting behind closed doors trying to build elitist groups is a thing of the past.

How it feels to be a community builder?

Everything becomes personal

Every time someone has criticized developersIndia or generated some kind of drama, it has always hit me personally. Spending this long with something gets you attached to things emotionally as well. I wouldn’t bother if it was work, but giving back in a community setting willingly for free is a different ball game where both your heart & mind are involved. I may need to unlearn this, but I don’t think I would be able to.

It’s hard to describe this unsaid pressure of keeping up with everyone’s expectation on how a community should be run, and I now somewhat understand how leaders of anything feel when they are leading a group of people, there will always be a large chunk of people who will be unhappy with your decisions, that’s the hard decision part of the job.

On the positive side, everything good said about the community makes you feel a bit proud. So yeah, it’s a give-and-take situation.

Everyone expects someone else to do the thing

The amount of times, people who have come up to me with elaborative suggestions to do something, always fail to do anything themselves.

I get it, for some section of initiatives, I may be the only one who can do it, but that would be the case if I was the only one sharing my opinions, ideas, etc. in the community (as in the case of creator driven apps).

The good thing with forum driven groups is that you can share the burden of managing the community with the community itself.

• If you see something wrong, something that can be improved, instead of complaining why it is bad, you need to take the initiative yourself to fix it. The reason things are not perfect anywhere in the world is that people are not motivated to fix them. So you should either shut the fuck up or take the mantle in your hands and make the change you want to see.
• When you are in a community setting, learn to follow the community’s code of conduct and rules, if you can’t do that please leave. Nobody cares about your “freedom of speech” when you end up being sexist, racist, generate hate. You want freedom of speech? Go set up your own site, write whatever you want. Learn to talk, and write professionally, it’s not Instagram where you can go away with saying anything.
• The volunteer team in any community is as clueless as you are, but they still try to muster up the courage to do anything they can, NOT everything.

It’s a full-time job

This is a no-brainer, talk to anyone, in any community. They will tell you the same thing. I think we have been extremely lucky to have developersIndia, kick-off in a way that doesn’t need me 24×7, at least not as of today.

I have always been straight with the community volunteer team, any way you can help the community is welcome, I don’t expect anyone to give 24×7 to building communities.

You can’t listen to everyone

Always execute things, that you have the energy for. If you end up trying to do everything, sooner or later you will burn out.

When things go big, there’s no limit of feedback coming in, but that doesn’t mean all that feedback is crucial, learn to filter out the noise, look at things more holistically, and execute things that you think are important.

For instance, in a community setting, you would assume there will be meetups, unfortunately, I have never been able to motivate myself to organize one for developersIndia, I have seen how more niche meetup driven groups do it and the value for it, and honestly, It’s yet another full-time job, and I am not ready for it.

If you are lucky to have a team, then you can distribute the feedback among the team members, and let them decide what they want to do with it and how they want to execute it.

Should you build a community of your own?

When developersIndia started, both Sid & I weren’t aware it will become this big, we did the most basic form of outreach when the forum was established, and that was it, what happened in the next few months was a surprise to us, the community grew exponentially, that’s when we knew it’s going to be really, huge one day. We didn’t plan to have a million members, we didn’t plan to have AMAs, we didn’t plan to have a wiki, it all came right after we realized the community is needed, so we had to step up a bit.

So my answer would be yes, why not?. But I will be lying to myself if I say it will work out for you. It’s just built up on accidental luck, and it will need all of your free energy & heart to execute (which contradicts my previous point on helping people for free). If you are willing to do that, go for it.

Should you volunteer in a community?

• Yes, and always yes. I am not talking about developersIndia, any community you see out there that could use your help, you should always reach out and apply. Doesn’t matter if you get in or not, at least show the effort that you are willing.
• A bit of advice though, if you get to be in, try to be an active volunteer, one who is actively taking part in at least one initiative, if not try to be at least part of volunteer conversations, voice your opinions, ideas, etc. You are not helping anyone if you just sit idle. Do something!
• See if you can answer some of these questions that I ask to folks who want to volunteer with developersIndia. There are no correct answers for these questions, but what matters is how much thought you can put into them.

Building and managing communities is not everyone’s cup of tea, that’s why you don’t see a lot of people building them, so ultimately it becomes your responsibility (whoever or where you are in your career or life) to help out the ones that exist.

What’s next?

For me, nothing changes I will be here behind the scenes at least as long as I have a career in tech or feel motivated to give back, whichever comes first.

As for the overall tech community in India? I honestly, don’t know. I am hopeful for the next generation as well as the existing generation(s) of tech workers in India irrespective of all the hurdles we face every day, I hope folks can find some solace or help with r/developersIndia or any other group they choose to be part of. Just don’t do it alone. Find your tribe and stick with them.

Until next time. Namaste!