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.