We wrote to 300 members who'd gone quiet. Here's what they said.

In December I pulled a list of members who had been active for at least a month at some point in 2024 and then hadn't visited for three months or more. There were a little over 300 of them. Instead of a cheerful "we miss you" campaign, I wrote one plain email from me and sent it out in small batches.

What I sent

Three sentences. I noticed you haven't been around for a while, and that's completely fine. If something here put you off or stopped being useful, I'd really like to know, and one line is plenty. If you'd rather not hear from me, reply "no thanks" and I won't write again.

What came back

• About one in five replied, far more than I expected.
• The most common answer, by a distance, was "life got busy". Nothing to fix there, and people appreciated not being nagged.
• The second most common was that notifications had stopped arriving. That turned out to be a real email problem, which I've written about separately.
• A smaller group said the feed had become too noisy to find the conversations they cared about.
• A handful had joined for one group that later went quiet.

What I'm changing

The email delivery is fixed. Next I'm making it easier to follow a few groups without seeing everything else, and I'll check in with the hosts of any group that goes quiet for a month. Around forty people have come back so far, which I'll happily take, but the replies were worth more than the returns.

If you try this yourself: keep it personal, keep it short and make it easy to say no. Then read every single reply.