Microcommunities
Author: Peter Kaminski Issue: 2025-06-18
Microcommunities
by Peter Kaminski
Some of my best experiences online were in big, public spaces like USENET (around 1993), Flickr (around 2003), and Twitter (around 2013). It felt like I could reach anybody online, and I could see around the whole space.
Flash-forward to now, and I’ve been sad that those big, open spaces don’t exist in the same way anymore. It’s been seeming like a regression or a failure of the modern world. Reflexively, I was thinking that smaller or more private online communities were “wrong.”
But then I had one of those epiphanies–small is kinda beautiful! I still miss the broad feeling of interacting with “everyone,” but I realized I’m in a lot of small communities. Forty-five (!) on Discord, five on Signal, five on Matrix, a few on Telegram, one on Slack.
I’m a lurker in probably most of them, but a participant in more than a few. And while it’s nice sometimes that they’re private, I still miss having the conversations within them discoverable to “friends we haven’t met yet.”
But so what? I think a much greater variety of people participate in these microcommunities today than in past decades. While I look forward to some magical future where conversations are more discoverable, and where good ideas get better distribution, maybe that’s not today’s thing.
So, here’s to microcommunities. I’ll start thinking of them as a feature, not a bug, and let go of my memories of bygone times, and still hold onto my dreams of a web that connects us in both big and small ways—where intimacy and openness can coexist.
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