> The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. What you're describing are two attrac

> The future of the Internet seems to me to be small private "hidden" communities and mega platforms filled with garbage. What you're describing are two attractor-points in community design space, for communities that don't put any effort into fixing their position elsewhere in the design space. • Managed-membership communities don't grow by default, because by default they don't advertise / recruit members. So they have strong cultures, but they're "hidden." • Unmanaged-membership communities start off small and nice, sort of like closed-membership communities; but then they grow "by adsorption" — diluting the original spirit of the community with greater and greater numbers of people who are less and less committed to the premise of the community. Until the community is a generalized nothing, a random sampling of all of humanity. A managed-membership community that advertises / actively recruits could be nice, but it would have to first also avoid the third natural attractor-pole in community design: becoming a cult-of-personality-driven money-making scheme.