Luisf

Y'know what fuck it I've been mulling some o' these over for a hot minute, here are some lessons I've learned from being a Serial Community Builder. Gonna limit myself to 3 tonight just so I get to bed, but if I wake up w/ some more burning in me I'll add on.

1. People are already where they wanna be. If I've retrospectively learned anything from my days making WoW guilds, it's that people generally already have a full social life. Don't expect your new community to look like the ones you're already in, with people hanging out regularly; your community members have other places they do that.
2. Choose early, choose often: who's in or out? This decides how you spread and how much you gotta worry about your rules. If it's just trusted friends and friends-of-friends, you don't really need rules, but if you're open to The Public™ you gotta get everybody on the same page – and that goes deeper than a superficial "no bigotry" clause. I've been burned by people crying racism when there was a list of 3 cults and crying transphobia because a transbian was rewritten to be a dirtbag; it's not that people want bigotry, it's that people won't agree on what counts.
3. You're gonna fuck up. There is no risk nullification, only risk mitigation, and the law of truly large numbers dictates that with enough time, shit'll go wrong. If you want to build a long-term, stable community, you gotta be ready to make mistakes & come back from them. If you aren't as concerned about long-term stability, then just be ready to bail before you hit burnout & trauma.

Got a couple more still burning:

4. You are the central member of the community. This is sort of a corrolary to 1, and means two things at once. First: it doesn't matter how much you try to structure things without a hierarchy or make it easy for others to participate, you made the community. People will defer to you by default, and people will expect you to make major decisions. Second: you cannot simply be a facilitator, creating a space & then letting others fill it with their desires. The era of absentee mods is over (if it ever existed to begin with). Everyone will be looking to you to organize community events, find new people, & give the community enough identity that they can decide if they wanna leave or stay.
5. Most people are lurkers. The rule of thumb I heard was 90-10: within any given slice of a community, 90% of people will be disengaged, 10% will engage. This is assumed to apply at all levels, e.g. of the people that engage, 90% will engage casually, 10% will self-start on engagement, then of the people that self-start, etc. Note that these numbers aren't precise; Cohost staff has mentioned that an 8% subscriber conversion rate is incredible, while my TTRPG study server of 34 has a loose engagement rate of ~23% (give or take 5%). The point is the pattern: no matter how excited everyone is to join, the majority of them will recede into the woodwork.
6. Communities are defined by what they do. This can be as deliberate as "we host Jackbox every Friday," but can also be as incidental as "whenever one of us has an idea that needs refining, we bring it here first." The more incidental you want to make things, the more you have to be the one to model that behavior. The more your desired community depends on people interacting, the more vulnerable you are to point 5.

EDIT: shit almost forgot an important one

7. Everything is politics. You cannot have an apolitical community, only quiet politics or loud politics. The noise level of your politics also will not correspond to how "big" the political issue is; who's dating whom can be just as much of a flashpoint as racism or capitalism. People will schism over who gets attention in a community, Discord servers have fallen apart over bi/pan lesbian Discourse, events have ended because a leader was also a sex pest, the end result is all the same: no more community, though its shadow may lead to new communities forming. As a corrolary to point 2, your politics should be an important factor in deciding who's in and who's out so you can head major conflicts off before they start.

As a fellow serial community builder, this is all good advice. I have a few in a similar vein to share:

• You set the tone. If you started the community, you set the tone of the community. If your active, other people will be active. But also if you're constantly making snide remarks, people will make snarky comments. If you are being dismissive of concerns, people will just leave instead of voice them. If you're a mod, you have to be engaged and always trying to deescalate if needed.

• The first few members you add are critical, and shouldn't all be your close friends At least that latter part is true if you're trying to build a larger community and not just make a server for friends to hang out. If you start a server with you and your 5 best friends + your 3 partners, you're going to have a great time. But that ninth member you invite? They're gonna be met with nothing but in jokes and references they don't understand, they'll feel like an outsider, and leave. Same with the tenth and 11th.

• After a few months, the community will be hard for new people to join solo This is an extensive of the above. Once a community has existed for some time, everyone in there will have the kind of in jokes that makes the community hard for new people to get into. If your community grows on its own from open invites and people inviting others, the constant influx of new members will offset that. If your community has closed invites or you want to make sure you manage who comes in, a long period of no new members will make the dynamics of the community start to settle. Just be ready to make sure you and your mod team make sure people feel welcome until they can fit in better.