I'm building a tiny experimental message board / ...game? called Isles (https://isles.app/about). The short pitch is that when you sign up you're randomly assigned to a small island, and you can only interact with people on that island. Randomly, islands link up and you can migrate/explore the other island. I wanted to play with ideas of cultural exchange on a really small scale. I don't have any regular users yet, but if any of that is interesting to you, you should sign up if only to say hi.
Tech I'm using: Sprites, Cloudflare Workers, SQLite, Litestream, React SSR
Interesting novel concept.
With something like subreddits, people congregate because of a common interest. There's a clear topic on what people should be chatting about.
I don't know how far you'll get slotting a bunch of strangers with no clear direction on the topic.
How does the island hoping work? I don't see a "Change island" button. I'm assuming it's because there's only 1 island right now?
Islands only link up every once in a while, so once you land on an island that's it at least for now. When islands link up you'll see a big '?' appear in the page header that you can click on to explore the linked island. There are two islands right now because the populations are low. There's a mechanism for discovering new islands as the island populations grow.
My hope is that by smooshing people together randomly and making it harder to move, people will have a new way (new old way?) of interacting online that has more of the good aspects of offline socialising. But you're 100% right that without a reason to engage it's going to be very quiet. I'm looking at different ways to tackle this that range from "it's a video game now" to something much more subtle.