Online communities and social communities: a primer

4 Types of Online Communities & Best Practices on How to Use Them

Explore the four different types of online communities, why they’re important for businesses, the benefits of each, and how to get the most out of them.

The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences

As brands look to hold onto the internet of the past, the term “community” will become a loaded word.

The evolution of expert communities

A look at how online forums grow, thrive, and then decay.

Where Tech Companies Build Communities

The customizable, scalable community platform powering over 22,000 communities. Create knowledge through conversation.

Strengthening Online Communities | Rise Against Big Tech Powerbase

Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

Paid groups, bespoke social networks, and the meaning of community for internet-native businesses.

Governing Together: Toward Infrastructure for Community-Run Social Media

Decentralizing the governance of social computing systems to communities promises to empower them to make independent decisions, with nuance and in accordance with their values. Yet, communities do not govern in isolation. Many problems communities face are common, or move across their boundaries. We therefore propose designing for "inter-community governance:" mechanisms that support relationships and interactions between communities to coordinate on governance issues. Drawing from workshops with 24 individuals on decentralized, community-run social media, we present six challenges in designing for inter-community governance surfaced through ideas proposed in workshops. Together, these ideas come together as an ecosystem of resources, infrastructures, and tools that highlight three key principles for designing for inter-community governance: modularity, forkability, and polycentricity. We end with a discussion of how the ideas proposed in workshops might be implemented in future work aiming to support community governance in social computing systems broadly.

An internet of many autonomous communities

What if communities were built into the protocol? Delegated moderation, verification badges, and reciprocity systems for autonomous online communities.

The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communities

Where do rules come from in online communities? This study investigates how and why online communities adopt and change their rules. We conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with community leaders from subreddits, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse servers, and identified seven processes involved in the adoption of online community rules. Our findings reveal that, beyond operational reasons like regulating behavior and solving problems, rules are also adopted and changed for relational reasons, such as signaling or reinforcing community legitimacy and identity to other communities. While rule change was often prompted by challenges during community growth or decline, change also depended on volunteer leaders' work capacity, the presence of member feedback mechanisms, and relational dynamics between leaders and members. Our findings extend prior theories from social computing and organizational research, illustrating how institutionalist and ecological explanations of the relational origins of rules complement operational accounts. Finally, we build on these explanations to offer a set of design propositions that reflect the relational aspects of rules and rulemaking across communities' lifecycles.

Where Does Community Live?

ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional design, and right now those institutions are being built.

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky

Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky

Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

Open Social Network Cookbook

The Open Social Network Cookbook is the collective product of the Open Social Incubator, a cohort that MEDLab hosted from Fall 2024 to Spring 2025. At the heart of our work together was the question: How can the online communities that we participate in use tools that truly reflect our values?

Get Together: How to Build a Community with Your People

A practical and heartfelt guide to cultivating a community, online or IRL.Although communities feel magical, they don’t come together by magic. Get Together is a practical and heartfelt guide to cultivating a community. Whether starting a run crew, connecting with fans online, or sparking a movement of K–12 teachers, the secret to getting people together is this: build your community with people, not for them.In Get Together, Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto of People & Company share true stories of everyday people who have created thriving communities, both in person and online. They provide clear steps to untangle the challenge of getting passionate people together, helping individuals and organizations navigate the intricacies of leading a community, including: - How to rally the first people - How to get people talking - How to attract new, authentic folks - How to develop leaders and expand globally.The People & Company team reminds us that we each hold the potential to spark a community. Get Together shows readers that if we join forces—as company and customers, artist and fans, organizer and advocates—we’ll do more together than we ever could alone.