> maybe I want to be someone in one place and someone else entirely somewhere else (or at least not be easily traced between the two).

One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.

Communities don't scale. This is the reason why nobody has done and why you couldn't get rich forming communities. Communities are handcrafted to accommodate the unique personalities of the people involved. Communities involve activities where a handful of people can socialize and bond. A service with a million users can never become a community because our social/grouping instincts don't work on that scale. A community should always be a few dozens of core people, with maybe a larger number of non-core people participating occasionally.

If their goal is becoming rich, then this is doomed from the very start. How would it be monetized? Ads? Great, then you have no incentive to actually build a healthy community. Signup fee? Not going to work, way too much of a barrier.

Discord servers are the closest. People do build up friendships, relationships, enemyships, and a public persona / reputation within a Discord server.

I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.

Indeed, I think the size of the internet these days is partly the problem. The community in GameSpy and Zone were super small from my memory. We had crappy websites that tracked singles and team ladders. Then Steam came along.

They did, and it’s called Reddit. Then it got enshittified.

Yeah, exactly this. No idea exactly what happened but people at some point seem to have stopped accepting other people having different views or perspectives. With basically every community there was invariably some sort of oddballs.

I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.

For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.

But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.