I think it's difficult to grow programming communities. The rust forums themselves aren't the most active (a post an hour and maybe 2 comments an hour?) and those are official. Can we hope to grow beyond that?
Personally, my presence here is mostly passive to read news about rust. I wouldn't mind a bot posting links to:
- official blog entries
- blog entries from rust maintainers
- merges to "awesome rust" repositories
- videos uploaded by various rust conference channels
- announcements from rust conferences
Basically a "global" rust RSS feed that I don't have to do the work of cobbling together.
If that bot were opensource, then there could be suggestions to add RSS feeds or some other integration to get news.
Looking at the posts right now, most of them are pretty much what the bot would post: blog posts, announcements, interesting repos. A bot would add more of that.
To have people talking, you need to give them something to talk about and news is what people talk about, I think. We just have a large lurking community, which IMO isn't bad. To have people talk more, the only things I can think of are
A bot seems like the easiest in terms of investment.