Almost a year

The first year of 404Nerds is coming to a close, and it feels bittersweet and savory all at once. We’ve grown in ways I never could have imagined. Some of you have stuck it out with me, offered great advice and great ideas, and given me a place I truly enjoy calling home.

As most of you know, this year has been a wild ride for me. To mark our first year online, I want to share the numbers from this time frame publicly.

Are they small? Yes, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But we have something no one else does: me. You have my unwavering determination to make something out of 404Nerds. I’m not giving up. I’m refocusing.

MeasureValueRegistered non-admin accounts | 30
Members with observed participation | 16
Members who posted | 10
Member posts | 42
Likes | 64
Comments | 33
Likes + comments | 97
Recorded post views | 55
Games published | 5
Videos published | 1
Art posts published | 0
Dens created | 3

30 registered members. That’s 30 accounts outside our administrative team: thirty people who decided to give this little corner of the internet a chance. Some have stayed active and some have wandered off, and that’s okay. Every one of you helped us get here.

16 members with observed participation. More than half of our registered non-admin accounts took part in a way our system could record, whether by posting, liking, commenting, or viewing a post. This doesn’t mean everyone else never visited. It only means we have no recorded activity for them in these categories.

10 members created 42 posts. This one means a lot to me. These posts came from you, not from me filling the feed to make the platform look busy. Ten different people decided they had something worth sharing here, and that matters.

64 likes and 33 comments. That adds up to 97 recorded interactions between members and content. It may not sound like much next to the giant social networks, but these interactions are real, not numbers we bought to look bigger.

55 recorded post views. This is not the number of times people visited 404Nerds. It’s the number of post-view records our system captured. I want to be clear about that, because I have no interest in making our numbers sound bigger than they are.

5 games, 1 video, and 3 Dens. We started with an idea, and now we have places to share games, publish videos, and build communities within our community. We also recorded zero art posts during this period. I’m not going to hide that, because the areas where we haven’t grown yet matter just as much as the areas where we have.

Where do we go from here?

The biggest lesson of this first year is that building a platform and building a community are two very different things.

I can write code until my fingers fall off. I can add features, fix bugs, redesign pages, break something completely by accident, and spend the next six hours figuring out what I did. LOL. But I can’t build a community by myself. That takes all of us.

So as we move into year two, I’ll be focusing less on adding things just because I can and more on making what we already have worth coming back for. I want to see more conversations, more games, more creators, more friendships, and more reasons for you to call 404Nerds home.

If you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. If you joined yesterday, thank you. And if you haven’t posted anything yet but still check in every once in a while, thank you too.

We’re small. We’re weird. We’re still figuring things out. But we’re not done, not even close. 💜