Though I have not yet had the chance to join the RayFam, I am still one of (if not THE) biggest fan of Raycast. I’ve mentioned before how involved I am in the community and as of this data, I am inching close to being in the Top 5 GitHub Contributors;
Working Hard or Hardly Working?
I have recently started working with a company dealing in Industrial Hardware and Cybersecurity. As part of my (as of yet, untitled) role, I provide Solutions aimed at automating and securing parts of the company’s processes. Due to the large number of stakeholders involved, I have to spend a number of hours waiting for feedback from other teams.
Like many Paycheck Prisoners, in addition to more work, I fill these waiting times with frequent visits to forums and communities I enjoy being a part of. As those who know me know, a LOT of that time involves good ol’ Raycast’s Slack and Subreddit. This habitual browsing loop (see figure) makes it so I’m completely updated on the latest entries so often there is zero new activity for me to browse 😔.
Raycast for Windows
Following their Series B, Raycast vowed to expand to more platforms. iOS followed and eventually:
Despite HUGE demand (as of 3rd July, 2025, there are ~6k users in the Beta!) the rollout has seen some issues.
Invite System
Each invitee to the Beta gains access to 3 more invites they can then give out to others allowing a gradual initial rollout followed by an exponential growth in users. The biggest issue this causes is:
Invite Begging
An endless stream of users posting across all social media platforms asking for access to the new shiny tool. This has the effect of drowning out real feedback from real users - bug reports, feature requests and even general chit-chat is lost in the ether.
The moment of realization for me was when I saw the following comments from a post on the subreddit:
Though I do not remember being an active user when the mods were non-employees, the current list of Mods certainly meant there was truth to the matter:
This leads me to my strategy of:
2 Birds With 1 Stone
As one of the most active members of the community, I was uniquely poised to tackle the situation; I drafted a well-thought out message with some basic ideas and reached out to the Raycast Team via Slack with a simple pitch:
Let me mod!
I received a much more positive reply than I expected and after a couple more messages, the Mod List updated 🥳:
The Mod Life
This is neither the first subreddit I’ve moderated nor is it the most active but it is definitely in the Top 3! The biggest surprise to me was how despite not taking any significant extra time from my day, there certainly is some effort involved in managing a community of this size.
