[kayodelycaon]

There’s also the problem of communities that are not nice to anyone they don’t approve of.

Maybe I just have too many LGBT friends to be objective. But I’ve had to leave communities because I had to keep my head down and my mouth shut to stay in them.

LGBT communities aren’t perfect either.

Communities are messy and we have a lot of choice in who we pick to be in them. In the past, you didn’t have a lot of options and you were strongly incentivized to make compromises.

[altairprime]

If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club, not one’s community.

Community precipitates around shared characteristics; typically places or hobbies. You have no say whatsoever in who else shares that characteristic. Shunning is the only form of exclusion reliably available.

Social clubs are organized around voluntary membership, where one can choose to enter or exit the club at any time, and constraints may be placed to prevent that. Eviction is an available form of exclusion.

Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter are social clubs: one has control over interactions, membership is loosely or tightly controlled, and the threat of eviction is used by club leaders (which are sometimes an inhuman corporate entity!) to keep people in line.

Support meetings are communities: the shared property of “recovering from XYZ” cannot be revoked by others. A much higher bar of social violations — that are more or less stable per cultural context, but typical minimum bounds are sharing private conversations publicly and committing nonsexual violence — are required for a community leader to pursue exclusion.

It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of awful rainbow clubs; that sucks and I empathize from my own experiences as well. I’m still modeling the language to discern whether a given group is a club or a community; my best so far is to ask: “Is this a queer support group, that welcomes anyone queer and necessitates compromise?”. Obviously this phrasing is still mediocre, but that’s not reason not to use it. It doesn’t necessarily reveal clubs at first, but it’s useful for exposing the lie more rapidly if it turns out that it’s a club disguising itself as a community but malice and exclusion are prioritized over compromise and tolerance.

[kayodelycaon]

I really don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. I think you're trying to make community too specific. And support meetings are very much clubs by your definition.

Also I haven't had to deal with "awful rainbow clubs". In fact my experience has been the exact opposite. Twelve years ago, I went to a furry convention and ended up joining one of the most accepting communities I've ever seen. And let me tell you, once a community gets to a certain size, it will have Problems™. :)

[altairprime]

Ah, I clearly misunderstood. Glad to hear you’ve done well!

[drewcoo]

> If one can be selective about who is “in” and who is “out”, then it’s a social club

If one can be selective about who is "in" and who is "out", then one is a leader of the social club. There can be plenty of animosity between members.