[arjie]

I like many of these attempts at creating new communities. One thing I have noticed with many of them is that none of them have progressed to the point where there is a first follower - someone who isn't part of the originating culture but is induced by something to join. As an example of one that I find interesting is the Esmeralda project, led by Devon Zuegel. These things select for the kind of people who will attend a talk on crypto, rationalism, urbanism and so on every evening. I imagine that this is intentional to start with. You need some critical mass of true believers to get things off the ground.

But is that really the property of every successful community? I imagine that, like a tree, the majority of us are the trunk, the phloem that conducts the resources through, so that there are leaves and fruit and so on. I have no problem being the trunk of such a community, but I don't think I can be the fruit.

I don't mean in a non-participatory sense. I mean that if the leaders are the High Priests, then the rest of these people are the rest of the clergymen, but they have no laymen at the sermon yet.

[fellowniusmonk]

It's not hard to start a community but it does take a certain minimal amount of capital, physical space and sufficient population density.

I've done it on a shoe string in the past, but I don't have the space to do it currently. Getting off the ground is the hardest part. Considerably harder than software unless certain resources align.

[arjie]

What did you start? If you happen to already have it written down somewhere, I'd be eager to read.

[fellowniusmonk]

An insolvent co-working space my company took over after the founders offered it to us as we were the only reliable paying members, we turned into to a ethos driven local community social club and co-working space, I come from multi generational missionary family though I myself am no longer theistic.

Most people don't have the experience of seeing one person turn into 200+ in a geographically co-located place.

My family has probably planted more churches than any living group, they range from <100 people to >10,000.

There are transitional stages at every growth milestone, the hardest part is the first 15 people and you need capitalization to get over early humps, that's why missionary organizations exist.

Eventually you can hit break even or even being able to start a rainy day fund, but people aren't willing to capitalize communities the way they capitalize companies even though in the end they have way more socio-political power.

As a fellow SWE engineers and tech people really underestimate the writing, training and empiricism for polity and growth that non-coercion community building entails.

Even people who are vaguely exposed to missionary work are typically exposed to force-coercion oriented groups.

[arjie]

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I was curious if someone has put in the work to talk about the mechanistic aspects to making a successful community space. It's an evolving thing, but I'm sure there are many details that one can just get right. Would be a cool book to read.

[eswat]

> I don't mean in a non-participatory sense.

This is the issue I've seen in new communities. Although my framing is from seeing mixed digital nomad and local communities. But ones that have the ambition to start a tribe or even a hub, if we’re going by Vitalik's terminology.

If you allow in more “non-believers”, just anyone that can join a group chat and physically go to a Google Map pin, more often that not most people will be non-participatory after their first contact. This makes it harder for a core team to get things off the ground if they have bigger ambitions than just a weekly meetup.

I think the crypto community took that to heart in particular due to DAOs having very few successful examples, and many of these new crypto-adjacent societies are using a different model that’s more similar to building a startup.

[arjie]

Yeah, that makes sense. They're just too early in the religion for the laymen, to keep that analogy going. Right now it's just Jesus and his Disciples. Well, I can't wait to see what they come up with. I think there's lots of new kinds of cities we could build.