| as far as I'm concerned, it's an open question in modern design. It's not complicated. The rate of assimilation has to be kept higher than the rate of immigration. That doesn't mean small, but does mean a bit insular and/or "LURK MOAR." no-one has quite squared the market opportunity around those communities yet. I think they have. Forums, slack, blogs, their own websites, email lists, subreddits, twitter, facebook, g+, etc... The problem with the types of community you describe, is not that they're small, but that they're actually communities. Not userbases branded as a community. They can flit on and off services as they come and go because the community has multiple ways to talk among itself. You can sell them a tool or host a place to talk to a group of friends. But they're in too strong of a negotiating position with you for you to start a social network and scale it to the moon. They're already on the social networks anyway. If you're targeting a community, your competition isn't facebook. Your competition is a guy with a dreamhost account and a copy of phpbb. If you really want a killer app for communities, I think it was called Trillian. But that was back when the popular communication platforms were less rigorous at keeping everyone in the branded client. |