(fallen london stamps by A while ago, a friend sent me an interesting anarchist zine:
It has my usual issues with leftist Writings(tm) - namely, there's a lot of jargon and a bit of something I can never quite put my finger on but will inadequately describe as "a tendency to treat people's lives as Ideological Statements." And I'm not sure I agree with every point raised here, though a lot of that could just be me squinting and trying to parse through my aforementioned Usual Issues.
But wow was I still doing a lot of vigorous nodding!
(A quick note before I get into it: these are all in regards to online communities, where I use "community" to mean "a space in which people, many of whom do not already know each other, congregate around a shared interest." I don't have enough experience with IRL communities to have an opinion.)
I do think communities are still valuable! One of the things I took issue with in the essay was the vibe that communities are, idk, inevitably toxic and Bad and Tools of the State and goodness gracious OP sometimes people like a thing and get together and that's okay! (Although it's possible that this is because we're talking about different kinds of communities, and they're talking about like, activism and collectives as opposed to fandom Discords. And also, they're probably just really annoyed.) It's easy to say "make friends instead" but that's way, way, way harder to do. A community with some amount of enforced decency towards other people and the freedom to curate who you interact with can be a great jumping-off place for that. A decent community can also be a lifeline for people who have been isolated and need a safe(r) space to find their feet and begin building the skills needed to form friendships to begin with.
That being said, I definitely have been moving away from the idea of communities as the destination, and more towards communities as pit stops on an indefinite road trip. They're good places to meet other people who are headed in the same direction as you, but you won't be there forever, and that's okay. A community doesn't have to be your Forever Home, because home is something you carry with you.
And trying too hard to find a Forever Home can just mean pain for yourself and others. I used to believe that there would be An Ideal Community that, once found/established, would be my Forever Home that would meet all my needs and also all the needs of everyone I introduced to it. This led me to a lot of things I still cringe (derogatory) at: shunning people to Keep The Peace, refusing to see or acknowledge the growing cracks, shoving down my own discomforts and belittling others', desperately clinging to one community after another in hopes that this time, this would be The One, shoving down the growing whispers that maybe, The One did not exist.
It's not something I'm proud of. On the whole, I'm a lot happier now that I'm joining communities going "I wonder what neat people I can meet here and pack into my suitcase full of friends" instead of "please let this be The One, please let this be The One, please..."
Of course, friendships have their own issues. Sometimes you make friends with people who really suck, and you're a frog sitting in the pot, and by the time you realize the water's boiling you can't get out without knocking over a ton of other pots and pans and making a dreadful racket and getting boiling water all over the floor. Sometimes people don't really suck, they just kind of suck for you in particular, and it's still not great to deal with. But because it happens on a smaller scale, there tends to be more... modularity in how you can deal with the thing? Think of a social media with robust blocking, filtering, and other curation tools, as opposed to a chatroom where you're shoved together all the time and can either not block people or lose context for every other conversation with a block.
(And there were more thoughts that I wanted to add, but my phone just beeped at me to do a thing, and my brain has decided doing that thing requires tossing everything else to the side.)
