For most users, communities were just another way to describe yourself, as the list of communities you were in was public. For instance, the community with most

For most users, communities were just another way to describe yourself, as the list of communities you were in was public. For instance, the community with most members was "I hate waking up early" (Eu odeio acordar cedo). That's a useless community, there's nothing to discuss in it. You could find very active communities about every imaginable subject, it was super useful just like Reddit, but in a typical flat view internet forum and, most important: in Portuguese. In the last days of orkut, when all the users looking for the "social" thing moved to Facebook and Twitter, all the activity was in communities because still today there's nothing like that. After the end, some communities just disappeared, some migrated to own solutions like php forums and some, mainly football related, moved to VK, the Russian Facebook, which also has community forums almost exactly like orkut. I believe that 95% of activity in VK discussion boards are Brazilians, Russiand don't use that feature.