Communities are not fungible

What Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules? (Published 2018)

Life online can offer us a sense of belonging in any number of virtual villages. But the power to control those spaces isn’t very communal at all.

Thoughts on Communities | unDraw Blog

Even with the best intentions and people eager to join, most attempts to create communities fail and will continue to do so.

The year we wanted the internet to be smaller

Why tiny, weird online communities made a comeback in 2017

When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

If a company can transition from simply delivering a product to building a community, they can unlock extraordinary competitive advantages and create a superior business model. In fact, strong communities help support the ideal business model. Specifically: • Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop. • Members of a community are loath to abandon it, resulting in increased member retention and therefore improved lifetime value. • Members of a community support other members in that community, resulting in high gross margins due to a lower cost of service. The result of this are very real network effects: as engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.

CommunityRule

A governance toolkit for great communities

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We are an international community of communities bound by a common interest in persistent infrastructure. So far, we have welcomed agencies that manage communities spanning entertainment, standards, the built environment, natural history collections, scholarly communications, and research data.

Open Villages - Community-run social networks: rest of the world

Composable Trust, Part 1: Communities Without Credible Exit - Eclectic Corvine Muses

We guarantee that users aren’t subject to platforms. Yet communities are still subject to their stewards. Can we fix this?

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.

Landslide / Holdfast

Notes on what’s happening to our ability to collectively know things, and a look ahead to what this community is especially well positioned to do to support and revitalize our info ecosystems and the humans inside them.

npmx: converging communities

The story of the many people and communities that converged to build npmx together

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.

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The internet belongs to all of us. Let’s take it back.