The experts just saw the proposal and came, I think
It was advertised on Reddit
No idea. The Reddit advertising was done by another user (lyxal), not Rydwolf. There were probably also some users who found out about the proposal and got their friends to join, since there are a ton with several referrals
I assume they advertised in other rooms here on SE?
@jfo It's a fairly substantial academic field on its own with its own literature and venues and groups, there are pretty large groups of people on Reddit and IRC, there are more specialised ones like the Future of Coding one I mentioned or esolangs.org, there's a fair number of people working on industrial languages that have their own corporate communities. There are overlaps between all of those
@jfo Probably, but it's not only about population but also about enthusiasm. Less people may be willing to fight area51s bugs to figure out how to commit to a broad topic they care only mildly about
@mousetail About the "some of us" part: I think there is a large gap between the initial Discord server definition and the time when people started committing to the proposal.
How did people outside of CG.SE learn about your Discord server? Did you do some advertising?
note the number states isn't really accure, since often people strip out the long link
So people may have helped much more than their visible referral number
Especially on discord where if you include the referral information it would be a 3 line long link which people are more reluctant to click, so people mostly strip it off