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.
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Communities fragment as they migrate, online and especially offline.
ToyTown Germany died, and overnight both the community and its decades-old body of knowledge vanished. An identical forum was created a few weeks latwr, and it's still pretty much dead, many years later.
All those communities who tried to move away from reddit due to the API debacle? None really survived the transition. Moving away from a platform means losing all the passive traffic from that platform, and losing many more users to the friction of creating a new account. All the information stays on the older platform too. All that friction adds up.
I mean it wouldn't hurt to give something a bit of thought and consideration before calling it hot bullshit. Since you created an account just to post this, you might want to familiarize yourself with the HN commenting guidelines. They keep things civil and pleasant.