Can You Scale Cozy Communities? — The CMJ Group by Carrie Melissa Jones

I think this kind of linear thinking about scaling communities that I just highlighted misses a critical insight, that growing communities behave less like an infinitely scalable software product and more like a multicellular, living organism. If the community doesn’t grow in the right places, in the right ways, it’s easy for the community to colla... See more

Small, close, tight-knit connections are fundamental to intimacy,, and we can’t scale small groups in the sense of stretching them out to fit more people inside. To stretch out a small group and add more people to it senselessly is like trying to grow a cell by just stretching it out. The once small, intimate community will lose all the things that... See more

To scale a community, build lots of special, one-of-a-kind places for a few people at a time, and then work with the most active members to build fast interconnects between them.