Part of the challenge here is that “community” is a term with extremely broad usage. People speak of a “community” when it’s “people in a place” or “people with

Part of the challenge here is that “community” is a term with extremely broad usage. People speak of a “community” when it’s “people in a place” or “people with some common identity aspects” or “people who all are interested in some topic” or ‘people who have “joined” a group online.’ My perspective is that there’s an aspect of community that sometimes exists in the above situations but often does not, one where by considering others to be in your community, you have some sense of who they are, feel some kind of common purpose, and ideally care about them to some extent. As humans, we simply don’t have this feeling for more than a Dunbar-ish number of people. And so, we “join communities” but the actuality is that things like norms and belonging that comes from interaction with those norms and having interchange with some emotional impact are not relevant when it’s called a “community” but doesn’t reflect any of our human processes for belonging and cohesion.