Thoughts on digital communities

I had some interesting exchanges recently with Kev, Peter, and René, all touching on the topic of communities, both on and offline. Communities, especially here in the digital space, are something I’m very interested in. It’s something I find myself thinking about often and I constantly have ideas for things I should try. But let me ask you a more fundamental question: what even is a community? Always useful to grab a definition as a starting point:

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

I think this is a good definition. We begin by making it clear that we need “living things” to have a community and considering the weird AI phase we’re going through that’s probably worth stating. So bots are out, humans are in.

We then move on to what makes a community a community: the sharing of some “socially significant characteristic”. In the context of online communities, I like to refer to that as the “what are we here for” characteristic. At a fundamental level, members of a community have to share the same motivations to be there in the first place. If those motivations start to diverge then things quickly fall apart.

It’s like politics. You can have different ideas on how things should be done—and we can debate those forever—but we have to agree that, at a fundamental level, we do want to move in the same general direction: make the place better. The devil’s in the details and we can discuss what better means but there has to be at least some common ground in the overall direction. Without that, things will fall apart. And things might fall apart even with a common ground!

Back to online communities. I have my place here on the web. I’m happy with my site, I’m happy with my projects. But I keep thinking that maybe there’s something else that can be done, that I should be doing. I keep bouncing around various digital places—mostly forums—and I have yet to find one that truly feels like the place where I want to be. Some move too fast, some don’t move at all. Some are narrowly focused on one thing, others are not focused at all and it’s pure chaos. And I don’t blame those places or the people who tried to create them. Creating a community is hard. Figuring out the right mixture of people is complicated. Figuring out the right amount of people is complicated. Group dynamics are never easy to navigate.

I’d love to know what you think about all this. Are there online places where you feel at home? Is there something you’re missing? Do you even care about all this? Let me know!