The future of community: a future for communities | thesephist.com

First, there are more ways than ever for people in search of belonging to do things together, and the trend is accelerating. We are seeing new communication services designed for people to interact with each other, rather than just the void of social media.

The work of building a great community goes much farther beyond simply moderating a Slack group. A great community needs regular events and meetups. They need ways for leaders to step up and invent their own traditions, create their own events, and run their own sub-groups. Leading a community requires making it easy for members to become advocates... See more

There are only two factors that limit the potential for interesting communities to arise: the availability of people searching for new communities to join, and the ability for those people to gather and do interesting things together. Both of these things are on the rise.

As I’ve noted before, as the public Web and social media become too crowded, the entertainers and creators who can grow an audience are building their careers in public, but the rest of us are collecting in smaller, more private spaces like group chats and personal servers.