Small Communities Online

Back in March, Sara Jaksa posted my gift for the Secret Santa organized by Sara at the end of 2024. It took me almost a year to reply, this post has been in draft mode for a while.

This is only the second post for this year on my blog and the year is ending with only a few hours left. So I basically neglect the blog in 2025. I have two main reasons for this, first I’ve had a busy mind with work and personal life that I didn’t have the head space to blog, secondly I joined a book club (in Portuguese) I’ve read 13 books in the past 12 months, so part of my free time was filled with the books I was reading in the club.

I also started a small project this year with my friend Ale Gruer back in October that as added a good distraction from blogging. We have a Rock and Roll radio show that you can check it out on Mixcloud(https://mixcloud.com/rocknarede/) (in Portuguese).

Now back to the topic of this post. I love the work Sara did with the gift post, not only basing it on Sara’s opinions but also bringing other people’s opinions on the topic of Small Communities Online.

I’m going to say, in this post I will be agreeing a lot with Sara’s post. But I will try to wrap it up with my conclusion and recent personal experience.

I’m envious of Sara since they have no presence whatsoever in any of the big social networks that we know, not even LinkedIn. I, on the other hand, have kept all my accounts even the ones I don’t use anymore. Part because I am lazy but part because, in case I want to check something there. Either way I will confess that this is silly of me.

Sara shares an article from Cal Newport on The New Yorker from the early days of Threads where we concluded that we don’t need a new Twitter/X. One of his arguments is that there are small communities that are focused on a topic that are much smaller than big general purpose social networks. I agree with that, like Cal Newport says in the article these are communities that look a lot like the communities we had prior to the Web 2.0 era, and yes they still work and they still fulfill its purpose of get people together to discuss things they are passionate about.

James G, per Sara’s requests, shared his opinion and talked about the small communities being safer places where one can experience new things, knowing that the communities will thrive when all are trying what interests them. This is actually beautiful and made me realize that this is the most important thing about small communities online.

I couldn’t agree more when Sara brings up blog posts series like Manu’s People and Blogs, these are excellent opportunities to nurture small communities and provide discoverability.

Another great point is the community’s events, the Indieweb has been organizing a few carnivals. I’ve in the past participated in some of them and it is a nice way to feel as part of a community.

One thing that Sara brought up really well was the safety, smaller communities can potentially be more manageable and moderation can act quickly on members that potentially offended someone else in the community. Joe Crawford puts it really well when he says: “Moderation can’t wait. When someone has hurt someone else’s feelings, or is confused, or lost – the intervention needs to be as soon as possible. Someone needs help. ”

There is also a very nice thing Jo said about inspiring people to create their own home on the internet. If you think of the Indieweb as a small community of people that create their own website on the web, this is a great inspiration for others to do the same and participate. There isn’t a shortage of people willing to help, look for example things like the Front End Study Hall. This is along the same lines when Zachary Kai said he found “community and technical education” in the Indieweb.

Another aspect that Sara pointed out that others in the community are saying and Al Abut has brought up too is that the small community give a sense of being a quieter place, in Al’s words “One feels like I’m catching up, the other feels like falling behind”.

My conclusion

The idea that large social networks are the digital version of the town square, is wrong. But small communities can in fact bring that sense back. I find that participating in blog carnivals and monthly challenges together with other bloggers is really fun and gives me that sense of belonging to a group.

As a recent personal experience, like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’ve joined a book club and it has been really good for me. We are a tiny community when for our twice a month meetings we have about six people, but the conversations are really enriching the experience of reading the books. Every two weeks I really look forward to these meetings. I feel like I found a small community online and that is something that I can possibly think I would find in a large social network.

Thanks again to Sara for such a nice gift. I know it took me a while to post this. I would love to hear back from others so please email me or send me a webmention if you find yourself wanting to add to this conversation. And thank you for reading this. I appreciate it.