When a community graduates

For this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, Chris invited us to write about small web communities:

I’d love to hear your experiences of them, why and how you participate and what you think are the key ingredients for a successful small web community.

I love building and being part of communities, small or big, online or offline. I love how over time, complete strangers connected by a shared interest learn to know each other, learn from each other, inspire each other and become friends.

Shared interests are usually what communities form around: maybe it’s a hobby or professional group, a fan group or a neighbourhood group.

Similarly to how scientific ideas can be seen as “graduating” when they become scientific theories, similar evolution can happen with a community.

A community reaches its peak when — bit unintuitively — the shared interest is no longer the (main) reason the community stays together.

I’m part of a couple of communities that have graduated from the niche interest to a group of friends. One of them I joined somewhere around 2004 in a classic Internet forum and got to know people through our IRC channel.

Now, over 20 years later, our small core group of friendships forged in that community hang out together in a Discord server where we basically never talk about the original thing. We have grown from teenagers to adults with careers and families but the bond between us has grown ever stronger.

Sometimes these groups become spinoffs from the main community as the alumni keep hanging together while the rotation of new members keeps the main thing up and running.

Sometimes, it leads to the extinction of the original community and that’s perfectly fine too. I think a community that graduates has gone through the perfect arc and reached its highest potential.

I’ve been running our local developer communities Turku ❤️ Frontend for 9.5 years and archipylago for 1.5 years. Just this month, when I was looking at the signup lists for both community’s events, I felt so happy when I saw friend after friend after friend signing up. And a vast majority of these friendships I had built through and during these years.

These communities serve many noble purposes but making friends is the absolute highest one.