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.
It might be fantastic writing, but it's hot bullshit.
Just look at the hordes of visually impaired people who migrate to whatever new audio app is on the horizon, almost as a unit, co-ordinated by certain forums. They even bring the exact same drama.
> When platforms die, communities don't migrate
Uh, yes they do. Comparing neighborhoods to online groups is like comparing Google to a barber shop, woe is me they moved their servers, now I can't use them anymore...
In fact, if it didn't migrate and was on the web, was it really even a community? Think of all those Reddit IRC servers that went to Discord?
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 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.
Impermanence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence
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.
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.
> But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs.
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
I live in a city that consistently builds about 3-4% of the number of homes we need to build each year. We don’t build rail, we don’t electricity transmission infrastructure, all of which increases our cost of living.
NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
> NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.
You can tell the difference by observing that, intra-city (not inter-city, inter-state, or inter-country, which introduces confounds), the suburban locations with the highest land values build the least. Enclaves like where Marc Andreessen lives, where his family unit has been involved in successful NIMBY activism. That is an outcome that can only be explained by asymmetric government interference due to more effective lobbying from politically active NIMBYs.
What do you consider to be anglo incompetence in dwelling construction that isn't NIMBYism?
Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result.
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 is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation to allow more private development. I want both. They are complementary.
There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.
> There is no trade-off or contradiction between public housing and YIMBY deregulation
Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.
This is a fictitious trade-off. Deregulation (of parking minimums, height limits) helps ensure public housing is affordable for the taxpayer and environmentally friendly. If it also helps private developers as a side effect, and that is no loss for public housing.
You seem fairly keen on building public housing. Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY? The YIMBYs are the lobby that tends to be pro-new-buildings.
If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
> Wouldn't that qualify you as a YIMBY?
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.
We get it, you're a commie. No need to constantly repeat that you want public versions of everything that already exists.
That would imply that 96-97% of population growth in your city immediately becomes homeless. Obviously, that is not the case.
No it doesn't. The number would be the percentage of additional housing needed. Existing housing doesn't suddenly disappear each year.
I think, unlike what the author writes, communities CAN be moved if they are sufficiently small and loyal to the leaders who do the move, and the leaders don't screw it up. Moreover, the move is sometimes an improvement.
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.
It's not only the transition from low -> high that removes communities, there are multiple examples of public housing communities (of medium to high density) replaced by similar (or effectively low) density (as new expensive apartments) within Sydney.
If you are in America, that 'empty land' was not 'empty land'. It was Native land. Displacement of Native Americans was genocidal and destroyed communities and cultures.
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.
You will be pleased to know that I’m not from America, nor have I ever lived there.
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.
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.
Campfire by 37Signals [0] might be interesting to you. This can also serve as a foundation to add your own features on top of.
On the other hand, these platforms are free and much easier to work with, especially for non-technical administrators.
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.
Gratis in terms of dollars, but not free. You pay by letting them take your community hostage.
I'm guessing you looked at matrix and decided it wasn't suitable?
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.
Discord's just a platform. When Discord will disappear, I don't think it would happen overnight and the communities would have time to decide where to relocate, hopefully for an open-source self-hosted solutions, but more likely for the next hot thing in instant communication. And it's not as if communities don't move from platform to platform already: like wasn't there a big wave of people moving from Digg to Reddit a while back?
for discord emigres, teamspeak still exists, and for social media all you need is an old school forum that hosts videos and voila
The author of the article claims that a mere migration to a new platform does not solve the problem. It just fragments the community. I agree with that. For one or another reason not all people will migrate.
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.
You might want to look at the HN commenting guidelines. Namely you should avoid such uncharitable interpretations and show a bit more curiosity.
I don't think the article proposes that a community should not accept new members. On the contrary, it critiques the breaking of communities.
Migrants or refugees have to find a new community because their old one was broken for whatever reason, be it war, financial troubles or something else. So in that case, that first breakage of community should have been prevented and the community preserved.
If anything it's well known that migrants tend to build communities as well as high-skills "expats".
This is a completely different topic though. And not relevant to point being discussed. Analyzing the effectiveness of community building by different groups is a separate issue.