Lately, I’ve been thinking about why some communities feel like home while others feel like… LinkedIn group chats with extra emojis. You know, the ones that talk about “family vibes” in announcements but don’t even remember your name two days later.
Everyone’s obsessed with scale. dashboards, metrics but the truth is, the best communities don’t scale. At least not in the way we think they should.
So what’s the magic?
It lives in unscalable things. The tiny, human gestures that don’t show up on Notion dashboards but build loyalty stronger than any growth campaign ever could.
Here’s what I mean.
Forget the “Welcome to our Discord!” automated message that reads like a corporate HR bot wrote it.
The real power move?
That one unexpected DM from a community manager saying,
“Hey, saw your comment in the #feedback channel that was actually brilliant. Wanna jam on this idea together?”
That’s the moment someone goes from member to believer.
It takes 10 seconds to send but builds a relationship that lasts months.
Because no matter how decentralized we get, human validation still hits harder than any token drop.
We love shouting people out in announcements. But here’s the thing, most people don’t want to be spotlighted in front of 2,000 lurkers.
They want to be introduced to one person who actually gets them.
“Hey A, meet B, you both love building gaming tools on Solana and have the same unhinged meme humor. You’ll get along.”
That one intro can create a ripple effect.
Suddenly they’re building together, co-hosting Spaces, or launching something new, all because someone connected the dots manually.
That’s community design at its purest form: matchmaking with purpose.
You know what 99% of community leads don’t do? Follow up.
People show up for a call, a hackathon, or a Twitter Space, and that’s where it ends.
But imagine if, three days later, they got a message like:
“Hey, saw your project during the hackathon, that concept had real potential. Mind if I connect you with someone from our dev team?”
You didn’t just engage. You remembered.
That’s the emotional equivalent of gold in community land.
Because the bar is so low that simply caring makes you legendary.
The best communities have structured chaos, inside jokes, meme wars, spontaneous calls that start with “let’s debug this” and end with ten people talking about astrology.
You can’t plan that.
You can only create space for it.
The magic happens when people stop behaving like “members” and start behaving like friends.
And friends don’t need incentives, they just need reasons to laugh, build, and stick around.
Everyone wants to “automate onboarding” and “scale interactions.”
But here’s a hot take: trust doesn’t scale.
You can’t automate care. You can’t template belonging.
The most powerful communities are built one DM, one coffee chat, one late-night Discord rant at a time.
And yes, it’s slow. It’s messy. It doesn’t fit into a growth dashboard.
But it works.
Because when people feel seen, truly seen & they stop being passive consumers and start becoming emotional investors in your vision.
The unscalable things are what actually scale your community in the long run.
Communities aren’t built on announcements, playbooks, or dashboards.
They’re built on moments.
So stop trying to scale the vibes. nurture them instead.
Now excuse me while I go reply to three Discord DMs I ignored for a week. My bad.