How Social Networks Differ from Communities | Blog

On the surface, a social network and an online community can appear very similar. They both bring people together to share and discuss in a digital context. But when you dig in, there are stark differences between these two.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.discourse.org/2022/02/social-network-community
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Thanks a lot for writing this up, thatā€™s a great article!

What do you think about offers like circle, tribe, or mightynetworks? Iā€™ve seen them labeled as ā€˜modernā€™ community platforms in some articles. Then Discourse, Vanilla or nodebb were labeled ā€˜traditionalā€™.

In my view they claim the community terminology but they mostly work like gated social networks, with a focus on broadcasting content and engaging users. It seems they are used to gather a crowd of followers, but not so much to support many-to-many relationships.

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This is extremely helpful (probably not in the way that was intended though). Trying to find the many differences between Discourse and social media isnā€™t as easy as one might think.

Hereā€™s a relevant topic.

The algorithmically-sorted ā€œfeedā€ view is a major differentiator. Itā€™s one of the defining features of most social media platforms. Discourse has a few similarities in that aspect, but it doesnā€™t really have anything that resembles a ā€œfeedā€ view, and in my opinion, thatā€™s okay. :blush:

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They tend toward being ā€œcommunity-in-a-boxā€ platforms, which have specific use cases and feature sets for their audiences. Discourse tends to be more of a Swiss army knife where it can do anything you want it to with a little work.

I have another article Iā€™m working on defining the difference between audience and community. Itā€™s common to interchange the two, but they are vastly different concepts and deserve to be treated differently.

Hereā€™s a great article to get started.

Right! Itā€™s about connecting with people through conversations that matter to you. The closest thing to a ā€œfeedā€ in Discourse is the tracked topics feature. But this is all built around how you choose to engage, not some mysterious algorithm that picks it for you.

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Here it is!

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