When belgian OSM guys made the Welcome Tool in 2016, I set up an instance for Russia and started welcoming people.
I sent a few hundred messages, and after promoting the tool, some other mappers did too.
Alas the response rate was like one percent.
And when I got replies, sometimes I wished I hadn't.
But without welcoming messages, people in OSM feel themselves in a vacuum. There are still no links to communities anywhere on osm.org.
Here's the global WT instance: https://welcome.osm.be/
@zverik maybe you have some suggestions on how to improve https://openstreetmap.org/communities ? One idea being floated around is to embed the OSM Community Index map somehow in that page. (The list of local chapters is already dynamically based on the index.)
#OpenStreetMap