Gossip is a hugely important part of how a community constitutes itself. Without gossip, you don't even have a community. Of course, it can go in malicious and destructive directions as well
I think you're confusing "gossip" for "communication". You don't have to have gossip to have a community, but what you say is perfectly true if you replace it with "communication".
I think you have it the wrong way around. The gross product of humans talking about themselves and those around them and gossiping is huge. What else is Twitter really?
Respectfully, I am not. Communication is so broad as to be meaningless in this context. Can you have a community that communicates via smoke signals alone?
If people don't talk about one other then there is no community. It's a fundamental part of human culture, which has existed in every human society ever recorded, and almost certainly every human society every to exist.