My goal here is to encourage a bit more engagement to encourage more people to improve their financial situation. Here are some options that I think I could contribute:

relatively regular, blog-style posts going over some aspect of FIRE - "simulation Saturday/Sunday" or something; community encouraged to provide their own
news articles with poor/mainstream financial advice - gives the community a chance to offer alternative perspectives, so may be more engaging
"back to basics" series - post links or generate OC to discuss the fundamentals of FIRE - savings rate, withdrawal strategies, etc

Or I could not bother. It seems a lot of the popular FIRE blogs are getting much less attention now, probably because they're retired and stopped caring about the blog, but mainstream media seems to be taking this as "FIRE is dead because it doesn't work."

Anyway, thoughts?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

More content is (almost) always better. 😜

I think you're doing great encouraging engagement. Keep it up. Fire is a hard topic to drive engagement because it's so personal to everyone and everyone's lives are so different. Back to basic's could bring in people unfamiliar with fire.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I’d love to see more content and engagement. It’s hard when you’re a niche community within a niche platform. More posts amongst the same small set of voices may or may not end up leading to meaningful engagement.

Perhaps a parallel question to consider that ties in with your goal of helping more people improve their financial lives: What content would attract new members to the community? Naively the back to basics type focus seems like something that could be welcoming for newcomers, even just explaining what FIRE is and how the (Shocking Simple™) math works.

Honestly it’s a shame there wasn’t a meaningful migration of FIRE folks from reddit to lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I would post more regularly, but my financial situation changes very slowly and there's just not that much to talk about related to it without repeating myself. I don't follow outside FIRE resources, so I can't share anything of interest. I don't even know if I could categorize myself as FIRE exactly since I won't be able to retire in my 40s. 50s is likely... which used to be the normal age for retirement.

I mainly subscribe with the hope of hearing from other people.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would definitely like to see this community grow, but agree with the others about the challenges of increasing engagement for a niche topic when there isn't much action for each of us to take from day to day. Most of the active portion of FIRE seems to be at the start and end of each person's journey, the part in between is just slowly moving forward. It might help if we had more highly upvoted posts to catch people's attention on the main screen. Maybe we need to start cranking out FIRE memes like the Star Trek communities? 😄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ah, engagement for the sake of engagement. 😀

I totally appreciate people settling into a groove. I think it's kind of weird when I see people claim the FIRE movement is slowing down, when I think people just ran out of stuff to say about it, and the big spokespeople are largely happily retired.

I'm kind of that way myself. I've lost my initial excitement, so I'm interested in seeing others get excited. I see a lot of negativity both here and elsewhere, and I see the FIRE movement as being largely optimistic, so I'd like to do my part and spread that optimism.

I'm still learning things related to FIRE, but most if it isn't really actionable (e.g. I just learned details about the Social Security spousal benefit). So maybe a "back to basics" series would be more interesting, idk.

Anyway, I'm largely just thinking out loud, but I do want to see more engagement here so it can be a resource to FIRE-minded people who don't want to use Reddit for whatever reason.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I think you might be right that FIRE, as a movement, has sort of crested that initial wave of public enthusiasm and is not the topic of conversation that it had been, but is still flowing quietly in the background for a large number of people.

I think what the Reddit sub had going was lots of new or curious people asking questions and people providing feedback. It seems like we only have a small group of people that are already on the path, so we don't have much to talk about. If the back to basics approach drew in new people, that might help to get things started here. But I've always tended to be more of a lurker, so I don't have many ideas about how to increase engagement.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I don't really have any suggestions, but I can say that your Weekly Discussion is hugely successful in getting people to post. As you can see, you get way more engagement in the weekly thread than from regular Posts in the community.

Like most people, I don't post or comment much because I hate all the negative responses you get on Lemmy (and anywhere, for that matter), but I'll try to be more active.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

IRS makes free tax return program permanent and is asking all states to join in 2025

Good news!(if you live in the US) But there's already opposition to the program, plus it's on the actual states to join(and we saw how that went with the Affordable Care Act).