I was once part of a "traveling" community that would sign up for every new platform. A good few tech bloggers among us. We would meet again and again but the community still failed long term despite everyone artificially trying to make it work. I got one good friend out of it, whom I never talk to.
I one time tried to root in a new city, I talk with everyone, buy cups of coffee for reluctant strangers, had a ton of fun and a ton of laughs but nothing permanent grew. I made two good friends whom I never talk to.
In my home town I must have 1000 people I almost never talk to. Adds up to a lot of talk. Familiar faces everywhere.
Saying economics doesn’t model community is a bit like saying physics doesn’t model color because some models ignore wavelength variation. It depends which models you’re looking at and what their purpose is. There is substantial economic research on: Social capital (e.g., Putnam, though he’s political science adjacent; economists like Glaeser formalize it) Network effects and network structure Repeated games and reputation Religious participation and club goods (Iannaccone’s work is central here) Identity economics (Akerlof & Kranton) Trust and informal institutions Household bargaining models Matching theory, where who you match with specifically matters
I think the fact that communities are not fungible is frankly obvious. Fact is communities do die, and sometimes there are long run benefits to consider.
The challenge is actually nurturing and valuing community which this post doesn't actually grapple with.
E.g. the problem with Robert Moses wasn't just development. It was the style of development which was inherently anti-community. Nurturing a community requires common space where people bump into each other harmlessly. Highways dividing neighbourhoods, for people in their private cars to get to neighbourhoods with no commercial life and large setbacks between homes.
It's not that Robert Moses didn't realize community isn't fungible. It's either that he didn't realize how bad it would be for community or that he just didn't value community in the first place.
The memory of what the community was or had eventually vanishes. Jane Jacobs (referenced in the article) was the reason that I learned that the sidewalks in NYC's West Village weren't always so narrow. They were made narrow to accommodate more cars, which in some ways don't help geographic community strength.
When it comes to physical communities (e.g. neighborhoods), I think about some neighborhoods in São Paulo that are being destroyed by buildings and construction sites everywhere [1]. So many neighborhoods full of stories and friendships and people who took care of each other, now becoming part of this massive verticalization, speculation and isolation. Neighbors have to leave due to construction companies' harassment. The ones that decide to stay have to live without their friends around, in neighborhoods that grow more dangerous, with worse traffic, with less small businesses and without knowing who are their new neighbors (which aren't even long term living). Their houses look exactly like Carl Fredricksen's house from Pixar's Up.
When it comes to digital communities, I can only be reminded of how Orkut and MSN defined lots of adolescences in Latin America. Orkut literally had the concept of communities, where people gathered around similar interests (just as the early web's forums). I made a lot of friends in Orkut and MSN Messenger, some of them are still my friends after more than a decade. Facebook tried to recreate the idea of communities (with their groups), but Facebook is pretty much dead for younger people. And Instagram is just so isolating. It has a whole lot of standardized and algorithmically curated content that alienates you from other human beings.
I believe the reason why Orkut (owned by Google) was killed was that they wanted more users, maybe to compete with Facebook. But Orkut was too localized, it basically talked to Brazil and some other countries in Latin America, and India, where it was created. After killing Orkut, Google invested a lot on Google+ (do you remember that fiasco??).
If some social media website has no community, and has only negative effects for its users, but makes money, that is a positive outcome for its owners.
It's a net negative for society perhaps, but the owners don't have to care about that part.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
We’re not beholden to any commercial service and the mud is self-hosted by the community (generally the IFTF - IF Technology Foundation).
No one could disrupt our community the way Discord or Reddit might.
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".
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.
Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.
Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.
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.
Do you know what that sounds like? The "feature" that lets some credit card subscriptions follow you across credit cards although you'd like to get rid of them thank you very much.
I don't want a global identity for all communities I'm part of. Joe from the bait and tackle group (i don't fish, is that a plausible fishing group name?) has no business knowing what games I play unless I personally tell him.
Moreover, that nice store that gave the bait and tackle group a 10% discount has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS chasing me in MMO #245768.
I’m here for the project blogs, and news but yeah I’m tired of the best-practice evangelists.
Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.
As of today, there just doesn't seem to be any good simple forum software. They all seem to need quite a bit of upkeep.
But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.). Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.
There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind of community that we want on demand.
The same is true of individual humans. And yet, that is not a great argument for killing them.
How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything, anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the communities we are developing (say, FUCKING PUBLIC HOUSING), and ideally not spoonfeeding capital more of our lifeblood as most YIMYs insist on
Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance, the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.
Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline, tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with something else if you had just let the community evolve (or disappear) naturally.
Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.
I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.
Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure out when it works, too.
And history is replete with stories of groups who became most successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so negatively affected by one.
Last time I looked, Sapir-Whorf is almost universally discredited among linguists and cognitive scientists.
The wikipedia summary:
"The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them. "
I'm taking this analogy for myself :)
> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?
In my experience over the last year, these things are true...
First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.
Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."
Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.
Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.
It's a "need to know" basis, and I don't need to know your face, I don't need to know your gender, your age, where you are from, what job you have, I don't need to know your political affiliation, your religion, your other hobbies, what movies you watched, games you played, books you read, whom you follow, what communities you have joined. I don't need to know anything more than what the words in the post say.
When you "need" to know what is real you end up with social media like "BeReal" which is just an enormous privacy nightmare (requiring you to take photos at random times) just to make sure that people aren't editing photos or showing only the good aspects of their lives to the internet. Since when has "posting on the internet" become synonymous with a panopticon?
But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age has made in person get togethers have friction when they historically have had zero friction and were just things we did along the way.
This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual interaction.
Things can get better over time. When they don’t acknowledge this I can’t help but see the authors article as a dislike for any change of any kind.
Non-market housing will have extremely long wait times if there is not as much of it as the market demands.
And the NIMBYs and left-NIMBYs are still winning.
Relevant substack article (Towers Don't Cause the Housing Crisis):
https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/towers-dont-caus...
My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of building.
NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very funny very long after the fact. Good points all. Trust, respect, reputation.
Create a user, login, find the Adventurer's Lounge and hang out. We don't actually build or play in the mud anymore. We use the channel system to talk about "stuff and things" and really not a ton about IF anymore. A lot of politics these days.
The most recent discussions were on:
#sci/med/health/health #alt/conspiracy #misc/politics/gayrights #alt/animals/chickens #misc/cars #misc/AI #tech/.../programming
Here are some question for you: can you think of any things you cannot think of in your language? Hints. Beethoven, Van Gogh, 7. Can a democracy evolve from FaceBook? What kind of political system can evolve from FaceBook? Is there a language for Democracies? The important thing is not the answer, but the thinking.
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.
Economists have a word for assets that can be swapped one-for-one without loss of value: fungible. A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible.
...A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not.
And yet we keep treating communities as though they are.
When a platform migrates its user base to a new architecture, the implicit promise is that the community will survive the move. When a city demolishes a public housing block and offers residents vouchers for market-rate apartments across town, the implicit promise is that they'll rebuild what they had.
These promises are always broken, and the people making them either don't understand why, or they're relying on the rest of us being too blind to see it.
Robert Moses displaced an estimated 250,000 people over the course of his career, razing entire neighbourhoods to make way for expressways and public works projects. The defence of Moses, then and now, is utilitarian: more people benefited from the infrastructure than were harmed by its construction. The calculus assumed that the displaced residents could form equivalent communities elsewhere, and the relationships severed by a highway cutting through a block were replaceable with relationships formed in a new location. Jane Jacobs spent much of her career arguing that this was catastrophically wrong. The old neighbourhood was not a collection of individuals who happened to live near each other; it was a living organism with its own immune system and its own way of metabolising change. When Moses bulldozed it, he killed a community and scattered the remains.
Jacobs understood that the value of a community isn't in the people as discrete units. The value is in the specific, unreproducible web of relationships between them. You can move every single resident of a street to the same new street in the same new suburb and you will not get the same community, because community is a function of time and ten thousand microtransactions of reciprocity that nobody tracks and nobody can mandate.
In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive structures in predictable ways. Community is what you get when agents stop being interchangeable to each other. When Alice doesn't need "a neighbour" but needs that neighbour, the one who watched her kids that time, the one who knows she's allergic to peanuts. The relationship is specific, and specificity is the enemy of fungibility.
This is why so many attempts to "build community" from scratch end up producing something that looks like community but functions like a mailing list. The startup that launches a Discord server and calls it a community // the coworking space that holds a monthly mixer and calls it a community etc. What they've actually built is a directory of loosely affiliated strangers who share a single contextual overlap.
That's a starting condition for community, but it's not community itself, and the difference is like the difference between a pile of lumber and a house. The raw materials are necessary but wildly insufficient.
The internet has run this experiment dozens of times now, and the results are consistent. When a platform dies or degrades, its community does not simply migrate to the next platform, it fragments, and the ones who do arrive at the new place find that the social dynamics are different, the norms have shifted, and a substantial number of the people who made the old place feel like home are gone. LiveJournal's Russian acquisition scattered its English-speaking community across Dreamwidth and eventually Twitter. Each successor captured a fraction of the original user base and none of them captured the culture. The community that existed on LiveJournal in 2006 is extinct and cannot be reassembled. The specific conditions that created it, a particular moment in internet history when blogging was new and social media hadn't yet been colonised by algorithmic feeds and engagement optimisation, no longer exist.
You can see the pattern in Vine's death and the migration to Snapchat x TikTok, with Twitter's degradation and the scattering to Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon. In every case, the platform's architects // successors assumed that the product was the platform and the community was an emergent feature that would re-emerge given similar conditions. They had the relationship exactly backwards. The community was the product and the platform was the container, and when the container breaks, the product spills and evaporates, and some of it is lost forever.
Robin Dunbar's research on social group sizes tells us that humans maintain relationships in rough layers: about five intimate relationships, fifteen close ones, fifty good friends, and a hundred and fifty meaningful acquaintances. These aren't arbitrary numbers; they mirror cognitive and emotional bandwidth constraints that are probably neurological in origin. What Dunbar's model implies about community is underappreciated. If a community is a network of overlapping Dunbar layers, then each member's experience of the community is unique, shaped by where they sit in the web. There is no "the community" in any objective sense. There are as many communities as there are members, each one a different cross-section of the same social graph, and this means that when you lose members, you lose entire subjective communites that existed literally nowhere else.
When a Roman town was abandoned, the physical structures decayed at different rates. Stone walls lasted centuries while textiles vanished in years. The social structure of a community decays the same way when it's disrupted. The institutional relationships, the stone walls, might survive: people will still know each other's names and professional roles. The close friendships might last a while, held together by active effort. But the ambient trust, the willingness to lend a tool without being asked or to tolerate a minor annoyance because you've built up enough goodwill to absorb it, that's the textile, and it goes first. Once it's gone, what's left = a skeleton that looks like a community but has lost the capacity to function like one.
There's a fantasy popular among technologists and policymakers that community can be engineered. That if you identify the right variables and apply the right interventions, you can produce community on demand. This fantasy has a name in the urbanist literature: it's called "new town syndrome," after the observation that Britain's postwar new towns, carefully designed with all the amenities a community could need, produced widespread anomie and social isolation in their early decades. Stevenage had shops, schools, parks and pubs. What it didn't have was history. The residents had no shared past and no slowly accumulated social capital. They had proximity without context, and proximity without context is a crowd.
The same problem pops up in every domain where someone tries to instantiate community from a blueprint. Corporate culture initiatives and neighbourhood revitalisation programs tend to optimise for the visible markers of community, events and shared spaces, while ignoring the invisible substrate that makes those markers meaningful. It's like building an elaborate birdhouse and assuming birds will come, and when they don't, the birdhouse builders typically conclude that they need a better birdhouse, rather than questioning wether birdhouses are how you get birds.
The destruction of a community is largely irreversible. You can rebuild a building and you can replant a forest and, given enough decades, get something that resembles the original ecosystem. But a community that took twenty years to develop its particular structure of norms and mutual knowledge cannot be regrown in twenty years, because the conditions that shaped it no longer exist. The people are older, the context has changed, and the specific convergance of circumstances that brought those particular individuals together in that particular configuration at that particular time is gone. Communities are path-dependent in the strongest possible sense: their current state is a function of their entire history, and you can't rerun the history.
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Dispossessed about the tension between a society that valued radical freedom and the structures that emerged organically to make collective life possible. Her protagonist, Shevek, discovers that even in a society designed to prevent the accumulation of power, informal hierarchies and social obligations develop on their own, shaped by nothing more than time and proximity. Le Guin understood that community structure isn't designed, it's deposited, like sediment, by the slow accumulation of interactions that nobody planned and nobody controls.
If communities are non-fungible, if they can't be replaced once destroyed, then every decision that disrupts an existing community carries a cost that is systematically undervalued. The cost doesn't show up in a spreadsheet because it's not a line item, it's the loss of a particular, specific, irreproducible social configuration that provided its members with things that can't be purchased on the open market: ambient trust and the comfort of being known.
Displacement - whether physical or digital - is more expensive than anyone budgets for. The burden of proof should fall on the displacer, not the displaced, to demonstrate that the benefits of disruption outweigh the destruction of social capital that took years or decades to accumulate. And the glib promise of "we'll build something even better" should be treated with the same scepticism as a contractor who promises to replace your load-bearing wall with something decorative. It is, to be frank, bullshit.
Communities are not resources to be optimised and they're not user bases to be migrated. They're the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and over again, to remain in a relationship with each other under specific conditions that will never, ever recur in exactly the same way.
Treating them as fungible is idiotic, and we have been far too willing to let it happen unchallenged.
Lots of poetry makes no sense if you consider it to be a series of words to be literally interpreted according to a grammar rules and a dictionary. But it can often hint at meanings and ideas that can't be expressed directly.
Of course, there are some things that always remain that are harder to get rid of. That's not "lack of language preventing you from thinking things", but rather "assumptions so deeply built into language that it is hard, though perhaps not impossible, to escape them".
NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.
Its quite simple to me. We the grown ups (together) are to facilitate housing for the kids. If we can't do that anymore we should ask ourselves why we don't want to do that anymore?
Quite interesting is how the (now proverbial) 40 year old isn't really attacking the problem.
I won't be around but I'm curious how their kids in turn will share the tiny room till 40.
We've let the pendulum swing too hard and instead of a dictatorship of technocrats, we have a dictatorship of vetocrats. A relatively small group of people, sometimes one single individual, can make new construction more complicated than lunar exploration, and there are indeed neighbourhoods whose permitting process took longer than the entire Apollo project.
I live in a house built on a former brownfield, 32 semi-detached houses in total. The whole project was delayed by four years by one dedicated octogenarian who didn't like the idea of new people in "his" neighbourhood and pulled out all stops he could (or even couldn't).
I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human.
We need public fucking housing.
There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.
If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.
YIMBY is the pro-private-development lobby, as best I can tell. PHIMBY is the term I've seen.
> If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
Well I'm not sure what you're proposing but if it can be characterised as "mass public housing" it sounds like a terrible idea on the face of it, and most people would probably oppose it on that ground. But the YIMBYs would have to agree that you're allowed to try it if you want, otherwise they'd be NIMBYs, on the basis that they are telling other people they can't build on their land.