Allow me to quote from Clay Shirky’s “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:
We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
This produces potentially not-very-satisfying answers, I’m afraid. There are plenty of Discourse instances without people, which don’t exactly count as “community”. And most internet communities exist outside of Discourse instances[1]. But when you have Discourse + a group of people, the word “community” applies to the whole. It also applies to just the people and in some cases, it can apply to just the software too.
Truth is “community” is just a label we apply to a group of people. Where is that group? You might find the group under a menu item that’s labeled:
- talk
- discuss
- discourse
- community
- forum
- [insert your own prefered label]
That label might even be aspirational. The point is you need some way to let people know where to connect with other like-minded people. You might want to reserve “community” for just the people in the group and that’s a fine instinct. But it’s not helpful if that insistence prevents people from finding their group.
An aside about “community everywhere”
I’ve been on a little crusade against the “community everywhere” concept:
It feels like a trap to look at people who are gathered on a variety of platforms as if they are part of a larger community. Communities are fractal and they do overlap, but that doesn’t mean you can slap the “community” label on a large swath of groups that are only connected by a common interest. It’s not unusual for people to deliberately chose one platform and ignore others. Nothing wrong with reaching out to people who aren’t using your platform, but respect your community and other people’s communities.
For a large forum, it might not even be appropriate to call it “community”-singular. Oftentimes I find myself talking about the “forums”, meaning one Discourse instance with loosely defined sub-communities. Because social and technical considerations can’t be separated, these subcommunities often congregate in specific categories.
Indeed, “community” properly shouldn’t be used for people who visit once in a while and never connect with anyone else.
Unfortunately. ↩︎