Longing for (digital) community

There’s this tweet that has been stuck in my head lately.

What everyone wants to belong to is a community but they keep winding up in audiences instead and I think this is the cause of a tremendous amount of suffering right now.
— @girlziplocked September 2, 2020

I used to be part of a tight-knit online community and it was such a gratifying experience. For a few cozy years it felt like I was living the dream we were promised in the 90’s. The dream of a web where you could connect with like-minded persons from all over the world unrestricted by age, gender, or physical location.

We built stuff for each other in that community. Some of it was silly, some of it was useful, all of it was situated software. The code had soul. Sometimes we purposefully didn’t refactor a clumsy/slow piece of code because it was associated with a particularly fun in-joke or because someone was very proud of an algorithm they’d made. Using a video call and Live Share to collaboratively edit source was some of the most fun I’ve ever had on a computer.

As I write this, I keep wanting to use that same word to describe everything: ‘gratifying’. I think that word so perfectly captures the vibe of knowing the in-jokes, having relationships to other members, and feeling like your voice mattered.

That community eventually died. Not from some devastating event, just slowly over time as people’s attentions shifted. I’ve been trying to recreate that same feeling of belonging over on Cohost¹ by posting frequently and interacting with other people’s posts. But I worry Cohost might be to loosely coupled a community. Social media just isn’t the same as the semi-public space of a chat room².