One of the downsides of transitioning to this forum wasthat a lot of people never bothered coming on board. That, and also a lot of people got tired of the chaos that happened since Arctic Moon became head Admin, and later during Jacob and Alex's rule.
For example, I don't think I've seen a single post from Louisa on this forum, which is sad because I liked reading what she had to say.
The point I'm making is a community like this one is boring when you have the same amount of people (who you can count with your fingers) posting over and over.
This forum is one built on the idea of free speech and sharing ideas, and it's impossible to do that with such a small group.
The question is, how do we revive the forum? How do we get it back to where it once was? How can we get it to the point where we have close to 60 people participating in the direction of the forum's future as opposed to the 15 we have now?
I've always been interested in seeing this place be a fun and interractive place, it's why I lead the campaigns that I did, and then later ran to be Admin. It's why the rules are as liberal as they are now. It's disappointing to me to see the forum in such a weakened state.
All constructive inputs are welcome.
P.S:
No, we will not be deleting posts. It's been proven by 3 different admins why that's a negative idea and not compatable with this community. Alternatives exist, and we can work through them together.

Okay, here's what I think.
First, After having that long period of chaos, it could be hard for some people to trust the new staff of the group quickly. And I think one of the things we need is having a team which makes sure to apply the rules and deals with those who break them. Otherwise there's no point of said rules.
For that we need at least one or 2 more new moderators as soon as possible because the current ones aren't active and I'm not blaming you or any of them for that, each of us has stuff to do in real life which may let being active be very much impossible for some time.
But recently there was a situation which I don't understand why there's not a single comment from the staff about it.
Anyway, another reason I guess is comments of some users. Sometimes they make great posts which I really like but in some other cases it really feels like they want to criticize just for the sake of criticism. And I'll be honest, this kind of posts annoys me a lot probably more than it should. In short, we have to respect each other's posts / work / opinions more, of course if they are not ofensive.
Another point which I'm sorry to talk about is the program itself, some people are less active because they find it slow and buggy probably.
May be we can bring more people to participate by creating more interesting topics and discussions? I am not sure about that one honestly. This is what I have for now, I will edit this if I have more to say.

For me, the whole program works well. Maybe we need more topics that are not so easy to find on other websites.
For example, if you like reading about Android, it would be nice to see more posts here about apps, phones, and the whole ecosystem.
If you like reading books, more topics about books would also be good.
In theory, groups should attract people who want to become experts in a particular topic, but in the end it didn’t really work.
Pajper wrote some stats how we use elten. Private messages have been more and more popular since 2020, or generally since the beginning, but forum was the most popular maybe 4 years ago.
I think we have to just attrack new users who haven't been on elten. Write on some groups on fb or reddit, everywhere.

Nobody wants to post here because it's boring as fuck, you are an egomaniac who wants to larp like his digital thiefdom is the blindy agora, and it's all on a platform that's dead as a whole. You basically took over some dune in the middle of a desert where nobody lives or wants to go to and are wondering why nobody wants to come to your awesome new philosopher settlement. It's not even entertaining to troll you like Alchappers was, and considering like a solid 60%+ of active elten users are full time or part time trolls you've basically alienated most of your market already.

Also, to clarify the whole free speech haven thing: you can say whatever you want as long as it's not making fun of Sir-Charlie's precious feelings, then you'll get two warnings for the price of one kek.

I agree with post 2 and 3. I for example engage with a lot of tech related news, in particular on Mastodon. I've always wondered whether it would encourage more discussions if I opened some discussions sharing articles or tech related news that may not be seen otherwise from a lot of people. For example, I think a lot of EU citicens don't even know of chat control. However, I don't want to seem like I am the one spam-opening a lot of topics without feedback or any comments, which is why I don't do it.

um, ok then... But yeah I agree with the suggestion of sharing elten threw other platforms. Maybe audiogames.net forum as well because there are a lot of games and a lot of audiogame groups hear on elten and whatnot. And there are some old users that did come back to elten but very few come online except maybe russiandan and the rest of them. I did do a review of elten on my YT but suffice it to say it was probably not the best...

Ok, I am actually going to write this in a new post rather than an edit because the topic is an entire different one.
I personally think that a lot of the activity loss isn't necessarly related to the change of administration, but to Elten as well as some users previously mentioned. I got tired of bashing someone who is busy and can't do anything about it. And right now, Elten isn't even all that unstable - it just could be better optimized and maintained. Regardless of that, I feel like I, and probably a lot of other users, conducted a shift within the last few years.
There used to be a time where I had Elten open all the time, would actively post into my feed, get countless private messages a day, relax in conferences, and, most importantly, engage in the forum actively because I would monitor every thread known and activate it's notifications.
Now, I open Elten one or twice a day if I have something to say or want to read responses in a thread. My private messages shifted to Whatsapp and Discord and I haven't gotten mroe than five here (3 of which were from Elten itself) within the last weeks. Conferences are being held on TeamTalk and Discord instead. I disabled forum notifications entirely and read what I want to. The feed died.
I can't tell you what is responsible for it, but there was one point in time where I felt like I literally was adicted to news. Private messages, feeds to engage with, new blog posts to read and literally hundreds of forum posts a week. I wanted to lose my attachment a bit and focus on other things, and I successfully managed that. Now I post a hundred forum posts, but within the time frame of several months. There is nothing to say anymore.
I shifted from someone young who had cuntless questions about the world to someone who was the more experienced (without wanting to sound superior) in threads. I don't feel like owning some power when moderating my groups (which have died). It just is something to do.
So, that being said, I think we all just grew out of Elten. It was more of a natural thing that evolved over the years rather than a sudden switch. There was no program update that just "killed it". There wasn't a time when I decided, "I am leaving Elten because the current administration sucks", even though I considered archiving multiple times. It just happened, and honestly, I wouldn't know a real solution that would get new discussions on track again.
It's really funny actually, because I think the "everyone gone" effect didn't just affect Elten. On TeamTalk, less people hang out. Apps get updates less frequent while the mainstream begins to develop more rappit than ever. Games which used to have 25 players minimum now averagely see ten.
It can be said that everyone just is more occupied these days. Some go to work now. Some left this program. Others are more occupied by school. Others perhaps feel affected by the moderation change, but is it the majority?

@Rudolf, so just create some new topics, and we will see what paople will write about your news.
And I agree that some people aren't active, because they're more busy. There's only 1 solution, attrack new people.
Each platform has to find new interesting people, or at least pople, some of them will write something untipical.

Wait wait you couldn't have seen me as head-admin because it was around 2021-2022 or so, when you weren't even here at all. You are confusing me with Daszekmdn. Or, you had alts which is prohibited by the rules, hmm.

Or maybe he was using the guest function...

More smart people are needed. There aren’t many of them because there aren’t many interesting topics. There aren’t many interesting topics because there aren’t many smart people. The circle closes.
Right now, for me, the English community has almost nothing interesting to offer. Most of it is discussions about computers, very little about life, and there aren’t many people here with real experience. Most of them act like kids

@4, that's strange. Then how is it you're still around? The only person I gave a warning was to Mikael, and that had nothing to do with personal attacks at all? You were warned on 2 separate occasions, and they weren't even on the same day.

@2, I think you're talking about the situation in the Suno thread, and I was looking at last night. It's something I'm aware of, and I've looked at some of them but I need to look at the rest. It's a few and like I said time is constrained. It's way easier to just skim through text posts as opposed to listening to multiple 3 minute plus audio clips.
But I think the most of you are right, there probably isn't much we can do because Elten itself has too sullied a reputation in the Anglosphere, and the foreigners can just stay in their respective communities, which are more vibrant for one reason or another.

If you have an premium features you can read the audio post transcribtions.

I do not, in fact, have the premium package.
Eid is thisweekend, I finally get round to it by then.

@13 yes that's what I meant. At least you're aware of it.

It probably would make sense for moderators and administrators to be able to read transcripts of audio posts of their groups regardless of premium status though, it's a really useful tool for moderation and shouldn't be logged behind paywalls for those who really need it.

Yes because all the smart people left this place to use clients which don't lock you in a blindy cyrcle, myself included. I mean I'll surely answer faster on Telegram, Whatsapp or Discord than on Elten.

-- (daszekmdn):
More smart people are needed. There aren’t many of them because there aren’t many interesting topics. There aren’t many interesting topics because there aren’t many smart people. The circle closes.
Right now, for me, the English community has almost nothing interesting to offer. Most of it is discussions about computers, very little about life, and there aren’t many people here with real experience. Most of them act like kids

--

The minimum would be to get premium for free if you are an admin or a moderator. But well, that's why dreams stay dreams.

I also have whatsapp and mastodon that I interact with people alongside elten. However since I interact with more people on mastodon despite me being active so much, then... yeah. For conferences I use either discord or TT