Communities are not fungible

This is basically what I think of as the "fundamental problem of conservation ecology", ie. that 'conserving' an ecosystem inherently changes it. The pre-human state definitionally could never be recreated (or maintained) by human hands, it will always reflect the contributions of its human stewards. So if conservation is fundamentally impossible, what's the real goal of conservation ecology? Is it doomed to simply create "theme parks"? Or can we be said to meaningfully preserve something (even if it's a changed or debased form of the original). Conservation ecology is what happens when these stupid philosophical musings bump into actual engineers willing to try to do it.

Human communities (even digital ones) ultimately have the character of an ecological system IMO (albeit in a more allegorical sense). What the author calls fungibility I might call conservation; weird Twitter accounts "migrating" to Bluesky is sort of like pandas surviving primarily in zoos. Some element of the original system is kept, but ultimately the "conservation" is more like "recreation" or "homage". Does that mean that it's futile to try? Or is there some sense in which we can have meaningful translation of the relationship web from one medium to the next? Maybe we don't even care about maintaining the system; if it's just the biodiversity we prize then maybe pandas in zoos forever is enough.

I don't think this is adding anything new to what the author is saying per se, but I find the parallels interesting to muse about.

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.

Two things this reminds me of.

I was once part of a "traveling" community that would sign up for every new platform. A good few tech bloggers among us. We would meet again and again but the community still failed long term despite everyone artificially trying to make it work. I got one good friend out of it, whom I never talk to.

I one time tried to root in a new city, I talk with everyone, buy cups of coffee for reluctant strangers, had a ton of fun and a ton of laughs but nothing permanent grew. I made two good friends whom I never talk to.

In my home town I must have 1000 people I almost never talk to. Adds up to a lot of talk. Familiar faces everywhere.

Best quote: "When Alice doesn't need "a neighbour" but needs that neighbour, the one who watched her kids that time, the one who knows she's allergic to peanuts. The relationship is specific, and specificity is the enemy of fungibility."

The memory of what the community was or had eventually vanishes. Jane Jacobs (referenced in the article) was the reason that I learned that the sidewalks in NYC's West Village weren't always so narrow. They were made narrow to accommodate more cars, which in some ways don't help geographic community strength.

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.

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.

When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.

What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.

That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".

Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.

Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?

Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.

Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.

The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]

The companies don't care about communities, or humans really. They want to make money.

If some social media website has no community, and has only negative effects for its users, but makes money, that is a positive outcome for its owners.

It's a net negative for society perhaps, but the owners don't have to care about that part.

After reading this I wonder if ifMud has survived 29 years because we use a modified perlMud that has an IRC-like channel communication system.

We’re not beholden to any commercial service and the mud is self-hosted by the community (generally the IFTF - IF Technology Foundation).

No one could disrupt our community the way Discord or Reddit might.

As there are no references to "Seeing like a state" by James C. Scott, let me recommend it. A great read that explains how hard is to create a city from scratch, how illegible community value is and how big organizations cannot see forest for the trees when using KPIs.

Classic slam dunk on economists, except I think it's a bit of a miss. They're a classic scapegoat and punching bag but there's tons of economics research on community.

Saying economics doesn’t model community is a bit like saying physics doesn’t model color because some models ignore wavelength variation. It depends which models you’re looking at and what their purpose is. There is substantial economic research on: Social capital (e.g., Putnam, though he’s political science adjacent; economists like Glaeser formalize it) Network effects and network structure Repeated games and reputation Religious participation and club goods (Iannaccone’s work is central here) Identity economics (Akerlof & Kranton) Trust and informal institutions Household bargaining models Matching theory, where who you match with specifically matters

I think the fact that communities are not fungible is frankly obvious. Fact is communities do die, and sometimes there are long run benefits to consider.

The challenge is actually nurturing and valuing community which this post doesn't actually grapple with.

E.g. the problem with Robert Moses wasn't just development. It was the style of development which was inherently anti-community. Nurturing a community requires common space where people bump into each other harmlessly. Highways dividing neighbourhoods, for people in their private cars to get to neighbourhoods with no commercial life and large setbacks between homes.

It's not that Robert Moses didn't realize community isn't fungible. It's either that he didn't realize how bad it would be for community or that he just didn't value community in the first place.

That's what capitalism does – it isolates individuals and destroys communities. No wonder why so many people are befriending AIs and there's a "loneliness epidemic" going around.

When it comes to physical communities (e.g. neighborhoods), I think about some neighborhoods in São Paulo that are being destroyed by buildings and construction sites everywhere [1]. So many neighborhoods full of stories and friendships and people who took care of each other, now becoming part of this massive verticalization, speculation and isolation. Neighbors have to leave due to construction companies' harassment. The ones that decide to stay have to live without their friends around, in neighborhoods that grow more dangerous, with worse traffic, with less small businesses and without knowing who are their new neighbors (which aren't even long term living). Their houses look exactly like Carl Fredricksen's house from Pixar's Up.

When it comes to digital communities, I can only be reminded of how Orkut and MSN defined lots of adolescences in Latin America. Orkut literally had the concept of communities, where people gathered around similar interests (just as the early web's forums). I made a lot of friends in Orkut and MSN Messenger, some of them are still my friends after more than a decade. Facebook tried to recreate the idea of communities (with their groups), but Facebook is pretty much dead for younger people. And Instagram is just so isolating. It has a whole lot of standardized and algorithmically curated content that alienates you from other human beings.

I believe the reason why Orkut (owned by Google) was killed was that they wanted more users, maybe to compete with Facebook. But Orkut was too localized, it basically talked to Brazil and some other countries in Latin America, and India, where it was created. After killing Orkut, Google invested a lot on Google+ (do you remember that fiasco??).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCIQoN0fUE0

And neither are people. And beware of anything that treats them like they are.

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.

Absolutely agree with the points put forward by the author. The online "communities" in their natural existence seem more fragmented as people in it cannot find a strong commonground for them to stick for a long time. (Generally talking about the numerous forums and communities that have gone dead in the past decade)

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.

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.

It’d be helpful to cite which kind of economists / intellectuals make such claims. There are different incompatible schools.

Is the blinking on that page driving anyone else nuts?

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.

[dead]

[flagged]

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.

Communities aren't fungible (in the sense that the actual particular culture and values of a particular group of people living in a particular area do have an extreme impact on that area) but also communities are not defined by particular areas that people live.

People who are from the same community tend to settle in particular areas and I think that is what the author is getting confused by.

Also many people in the developed world don't really have any community that they're a part of at all.

If you're interested in learning more about this you can look up the phrase "covenantal vs majestic community".