From the FAQ:
Help sites get off the ground by defining the types of questions that are wanted, recruiting a critical mass of experts, and committing to the site's success.
This is false. There is no recruiting within the site and all attempt to recruit from within Area51 are prohibited. Indeed the suggestion is build a community "outside" of Area51 (such as Facebook, Google+, etc), but there is no mechanism to link-back. In fact doing so raises concerns
From the FAQ:
A good Q&A site needs a lot of people to support it, so users are asked to invite their friends and help build the community. Continuous participation is really, really important because each phase of the proposal has different ways to get involved.
There is no way within Area51 to invite friends and there is no way within Area51 to rally current supports for the continuous participation that is so important.
From the FAQ:
You can comment on individual questions to suggest improvements or voice concerns. For more extensive deliberations and discussions regarding the proposal as a whole, we have a separate Discussion Zone. Click "create new discussion" link near the top of the proposal to begin a new discussion.
The discussion zone is not proposal specific and you will quickly get lambasted for continuing a discussions that does not apply to Area51 as a whole.
From the FAQ:
The creation of Stack Exchange sites is a community-driven process. That does not mean the majority of Area 51 users have to love your site idea. It simply means you have to recruit a community of users large enough so that questions get good answers quickly. Reach out to other experts to build support for your site; bloggers, enthusiasts, and support groups can all benefit from a world-class, canonical collection of expert answers to the hardest questions.
Yet you can't recruit from within Area51. And for those users who have found your proposal, there is no way to communicate to them.
The most fundamental structure on the Web is the link. Yet Area51 is against the whole notion of link-backs. It's interested in attracting attention from communities. It's not interested in building communities. That makes me sad.