[TeMPOraL]

> I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush.

For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people".

Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least occasionally active on IRC (later Telegram), and 5 people generating 1000+ messages between 09:00 and 17:00 on every regular working day. By volume, 50% could be casual shitposting, 30% interesting technical conversations, and 20% something relevant to the community - but 100% of it was a bonding experience.

No surprise that the people generating most of the chat backlog volume were also seen as the "core" / most involved participants.

[johnnyanmac]

1000 messages in a work day sounds like a lot even for a decently popular game discord. That sounds like it goes beyond "active participants" and more like "eternally online" people.

You already made your choice, but there is something worth considering on if you even want to be a part of a group (even if you had all that free time). I find it interesting that this post came up later after I came back to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323888