April 13th, 2019 at 01:40pm
There's actually a lot more than 1020 members registered on Mibba. The user numbers show how many people have registered, and that number currently stands (as of this morning) at 402518 members. That figure does include deactivated accounts, but the figure is still far larger than 1020. I imagine that figure may be to do with who is actually accessing the site at the time in which you used whatever resource you used to check this.
There's no way specifically to know how many people are online / posting at any time (I feel that would be fairly Orwellian of us to utilise something like that!). I assume a lot of people use the site simply to read and won't join in with blogs and the suchlike and that's absolutely fine - people will use the site for different things and if they're just using it for reading then we can't really force them to participate in the community as that might not be what they want to use it for. I also agree with divine; below - there's not a lot of demand for the social media side of writing as much as there was back in 2009 for example, when Mibba was extremely active. Even the bigger sites like Wattpad and Fanfiction.net don't have an awful lot of community participation anymore. People also grow out of the site and a lot of people will have left since the days of heavy activity and I imagine it can be fairly daunting for newer members to join in on a community that's already well-established and fill those gaps. Easiest way to combat that is for people to welcome new members to the site (newest members show up here) and encourage them to take part in the community but again, those people might be here simply to write or read and might not always want to join in on the community.
We do try and create events and get people involved as a staff, but the participation rate is entirely up to Mibbians. We can only put the events out there for people to join and again, it's not mandatory so if people want to join then they can and if people don't want to join / be active in the community, then that's fine too. There isn't an awful lot more can be done from a staff point of view to make the site any more active as we're already doing as much as we can to do so.
Realistically, there's no way to gauge activity other than to look at the active areas of the site. The Role-Play forums are always fairly busy, as are the General forums. There's normally a fair amount of activity in the stories section and the poems section, although slower, is sometimes quite busy. We have an activity challenge currently running and some of the tasks are encouraging people to take to the lesser-loved areas of the site and we are seeing more activity in terms of comments.
The honest answer to this is that there's no way to force people to be active on the site and even if there was, it wouldn't be something we would enforce as it wouldn't make the site a nice place to be. The activity on the site is always going to ebb and flow - for example, in the summer it's more active due to a lot of people no longer having school / college / university and sometimes during the spring months, a lot of people will fade off of the site for a bit to focus on studies. A lot of Mibbians are now older as well, and have jobs which mean they won't necessarily be able to be on the site as often as they were when they were 14, for example. Even as a member of the administration staff, my own activity is lesser now than it was when I joined in 2009 because I also have a full-time job and I'm completing a second degree. There are so many factors as to why the site activity could lag, and I don't think we can squarely say it's down to any one thing - it's far more complicated than that.
Staff also try to put together events in which we can get users more active, for example, Mibba's Great Big April Activity Challenge and Comment Monsters. There are also efforts from other members, such as The Mibba Revival Challenge, hosted by sebastian michaelis. Other efforts include blogs (x, x), posted by staff and members alike, to try and get the site going. We, also, hold the Mibba Writing Cup, which always sees a surge of activity.
We cannot, and will not, force people to comment and get active. If they don't want to, then quite simply, they don't want to. They don't owe anyone anything, but of course, if they enjoy something that someone has written, comments are encouraged, not forced.
However, one thing I think you failed to mention in this particular blog is that the role-playing section is always being updated, the blogs come and go with level of activity and depending on the commitments of users, such as studies and work, and the general forums are updated a few times a day.
A lot of people come to Mibba, with up to 20 to 30 sign ups a month, and prefer to just silently read what they enjoy; and Mibba, although not busy, has a brilliant community spirit for those who do choose to participate with long time members. Like nearly witches. said, it can be a little scary to come to a site where everyone seems to know each other, and asserting yourself into the situation can be daunting.
All you can do with Mibba is simply remain patient, explore the site and the forums for resources, and just enjoy your time on the site. Writing sites aren't what they used to be, this goes for Mibba, Wattpad, Ao3, FF.net - but there's still those who are there, just not making themselves known.