Thanks for making this Brittany!
I think there is a real distinction to be made here that points to 2 very different considerations/use cases for the infrastructure. This is the typology I’ve settled on:
- A group is a set of people that willingly convene, for any reason. Online, these are Discord servers, subreddits, Facebook groups, etc.
- A community is a looser, emergent social construct, where individuals are united by a shared identity built from common values, experiences, and/or affinities. The identity itself acts as a social signal others evaluate. Think fandoms, the Black community, the scientific community, etc.
Communities can emerge online and offline. Online, a group can take on a shared identity that carries social meaning to the people within it , creating a community (e.g. Blacksky).
Regardless of how they emerge, a community lasts as long as people keep identifying with it, and no one person can fully control what it is or where it goes.
This distinction between communities and groups is meaningful; while in groups, governance is often real and actionable, within communities, there is almost always no one “governance” that dictates behavior.
That independence itself is both indispensible to the nature of communities, and what makes communities fragile online in the first place. Online, the community naturally gathers as a group, a lossy projection of the community. To exist as a group, it has to gain two things communities never had: a hard membership boundary (in/out) and a governance that can enforce the terms of belonging.
For example: individuals within the furry community can’t, by themselves. dictate how the furry community behaves. However, a furry convention (i.e. group) can set rules and enforce them on the spot.
This is simply temporary for conventions and conferences. But online, it’s a necessity by nature. When this happens, a fundamental tension arises: groups manufacture authority that never existed. The group acts not as a neutral container, but as a transfer of power to a gatekeeper. For both established communities (e.g. furries) and ones born online (e.g. Blacksky), that raises an unavoidable question that has no clean answer: who legitimately holds that gatekeeping power?
This problem scales directly with size.
- Small groups and communities run because everyone knows everyone
- Large groups operate through structural mechanisms (e.g. businesses, mutual aid)
- Large communities operate on network-level dynamics
Projecting larger communities into the same structure as groups and small communities is a category error. It flattens these vital dynamics and forces members into that same power structure.
So what does this mean for atmospheric communities? Brittany already pointed at the structure:
I’d argue those are three properties should be separable:
- The community identity: the emergent, self-claimed cheap social signal that lives with the people who hold it (declared belonging);
- The Membership boundary: who the community vouches for (the membership list/gatekeeping function);
- The social space(s): the governed contexts where communities live and social norms are enforced (enacted belonging)
Collapsing these into a single “group” entity bakes in a gatekeeper-into-landlord problem. By keeping these 3 properties separate, the community and its identity aren’t captured by whoever happens to operate a boundary or a space.
This is similar to what @zicklag.dev proposed, although with an additional separation between who’s allowed in (membership) and what content is in a space (inclusion). It’s the difference between vouching for a user (a two-way label) and governing what shows up. By separating these two, gating authority for both becomes an explicit, contestable choice rather than an accident of whoever got there first.