As it happens, I am in the process of building something pretty close to what you describe. Here is an extremely partial list of reasons people don't do it. -

As it happens, I am in the process of building something pretty close to what you describe. Here is an extremely partial list of reasons people don't do it. - Written content: because network effects are real. Also because building a blog in 2023 that doesn't have awful look-and-feel or seem like a spam site is remarkably hard. Substack is full of chuds, but you can firewall off from them most of the time and at least you can write things instead of writing code to write things. WordPress is maybe the least bad option today if you want interactivity (which I would assume you do, what with the "community" bit and all), and getting things like SSO (for playing nice with all those other things in that gated community) costs money for dubiously-supported plugins that claim to do things they might not actually do. Ghost has a ton of weird limitations that are often claimed to be by design, so unless you want a plain white (or, if you're bold, black) site that's Just Text and maybe a few images, it's not great either. Static sites--community, no bueno. - Podcasts: this one is not "because network effects are real", this one's just "because open-source podcast hosting software basically doesn't exist and what does is bad at doing the job." Meanwhile, anchor.fm is free. - Chats: because network effects are real. And because the options are mostly unpleasant. IRC is difficult and mobile-unfriendly. Mattermost is buggy. Zulip is pretty good, but now you're a sysadmin and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (I am not doing this, either, because there are limited hours in the day.) - Videoconferencing: because network effects are real. (You may be detecting a theme here!) And because self-hosting Jitsi is an enormous pain in the rear. And, again, now you're a sysadmin, and most people on Discord just want to shitpost about Pokemon. (Might do this one, just for latency's sake when recording stuff. Haven't decided yet. It is hard. It is also pretty expensive to run.) - Video content: because network effects are real. Also because I don't own a CDN, and because YouTube is $free dollars per minute watched. Even my former employer, whose stack I quite like, is not $free dollars per minute watched--nor should they be! They're targeting businesses. (Needless to say: definitely not doing this one.) Gated communities are great, but somebody needs to make achievable these things for normal people, and they're probably going to want money for it. And while I've written plenty of open source software, the stuff I'm building won't really be portable to somebody else because I'm not making decisions for others' consumption. I'm making decisions for exactly my (relatively high) tolerance for system administration and exactly my (relatively high) ability to fix things when they break. I'm going to open-source parts of it, but I can only open-source parts, and they'll still depend on my CMS of choice, etc. etc. unless I spend time not building my thing and instead building abstraction/indirection layers for hypothetical other people. If you want people to do similar, maybe it should be you who goes and builds the path to doing it?