Communities are not fungible

Fantastic writing. The stone walls and fabric metaphor was brilliant. It's the sort of storytelling that made Steve Jobs' ideas so compelling (to me).

I see the same value in community, especially as an immigrant helping other immigrants. Someone arriving in a new country is much more likely to be happy and successful if they quickly find a community there. Communities hold so much knowledge that is freely shared but rarely written down. Think immigrants helping each other navigate the unwritten immigration office policies and surfacing knowledge that is invisible to locals, let alone LLMs.

I've been thinking about building an intentional community for years, mostly to surface that knowledge. Currently it's all happening in private groups on a dying Meta property. Previously it happened on a forum that unceremoniously went dark.

But I am afraid that all of this will be in vain, and that the age of small forums is long gone.

When thinking about online communities I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them relationships and trust networks. That's been basically impossible to do online. The networks where most of us hang out are even straightforwardly antagonistic towards people leaving and maintaining their identities and relationships in anyway.

I don't quite know how to articulate it but I really feel the social fabric of the internet has been limited hugely by this, and it's hard to seperate what is fundamental about community migration with what's an outcome of this limited circumstance.

Communities also evolve and devolve with time even without large external event. Maybe you don't feel the same belonging in the friend group after ten years or community grows to become something it wasn't in the beginning.

Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.

Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.

Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.

Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.

If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.

Communities aren't fungible (in the sense that the actual particular culture and values of a particular group of people living in a particular area do have an extreme impact on that area) but also communities are not defined by particular areas that people live.

People who are from the same community tend to settle in particular areas and I think that is what the author is getting confused by.

Also many people in the developed world don't really have any community that they're a part of at all.

If you're interested in learning more about this you can look up the phrase "covenantal vs majestic community".

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost.

But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new residents will never be able to replicate the community of the previous low density single family home neighbourhood.

You can tell this is a NIMBY piece because it doesn’t touch on how to build new communities, just that existing ones exist and new ones can’t be built and even if they can they’ll be poor imitations of the old ones. So instead of trying to build new things, let’s preserve what we have already. It would have been more interesting and honest if it had explored the role of say, third spaces and how consciously creating the right conditions can lead to community formation.

After all, even the communities that exist today were empty land once upon a time, until we built the infrastructure and community within. If all we ever did was preserve we wouldn’t even have the communities today that we value so much.

It’d be helpful to cite which kind of economists / intellectuals make such claims. There are different incompatible schools.

This the strongest argument against building a community on top of proprietary services, especially if's a startup / VC money is involved. It's guaranteed to enshittify / sell out to a big company, and your community will crumble.

That being said, I am guilty of helping building Zig communities on Discord, but in my defense none (literally none) of the FOSS alternatives was good enough at the time. And I'm also not really happy with plenty of the newer ones.

I'm now working on my own take of what an open source Discord alternative should look like and I plan to move away from Discord by the end of the year. You can find it on codeberg, it's called awebo, I'm intentionally not posting a link since these are super early days.

This is why open source for communication platforms is so important.

Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.

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Sure all the people who somehow find themselves unable to find community, are neurotic as fuck, and who are lonely have some sort of theory for how community is formed. This is definitely a case of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of any value in it. It's just pseudo-science dressed up in the language of science with some pithy lines of how "there's more to it than numbers" and garbage like that. It's just made up bullshit from people who really shouldn't have received a college degree.

Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.

These are the exact same arguments people make against immigration and diversity. I do not want this far-right drivel on HN, flagged.