4 Trends Pushing For Online Communities

A quick write-up on why online communities are accelerating like crazy now

Feb 10, 2021

Welcome back to a new issue of this newsletter. Here we try to figure out the arcane of community building using Web3 technologies.

Just a year ago it would have been impossible to imagine how the adoption of Online Communities would accelerate.

Here are 4 big drivers I can think of 👇

Narrative Shift

After Trump being deplatformed and the WSB craze, the narrative in favor of decentralization and online coordination is reaching escape velocity. Right after a full 12 months of remote work for a whole chunk of the planet.

These events are creating a psychological inflexion point and today anyone can grasp how important the Metaverse is going to be. And so it is to understand that Crypto is the canonical infrastructure filling demand for ownership, transparency and “dencentralization” (or re-centralization in the hands of new groups of people really).

And now Elon and Tesla legitimized the whole thesis in the eyes of the business crowd buying $1.5bn worth of Bitcoin.

It seems like events in our chaotic world will only reinforce the narrative around ownership (fighting inequalities) and decentralization (fighting authoritarianism).

Millenials (And GenZ)

It was long proclaimed that millenials are a complicated generation. One that doesn't fit in. But as millenials become adults and become impactful socio-economic agents and entrepreneurs, we're seeing how the world they are building differs from the former system. Indeed, western Millenials grew up doing World of Warcraft and Instagram during the financial and environmental crisis. Their ideal system and culture must be different.

Now, what’s the best raw material at hand to build new social environments, adapted to recent shifts in narrative and culture?

Explosion In Online Social Tech

Structured spaces are the primitive for sophisticated online organizations to exist. Long lasting versions of WallStreetBets.

And crypto is the cement of the virtual world. Thanks to it you can structure information and design new spaces at scale. Something only a handful of private companies can do today.

Social tokens let anyone materizalize their social capital in the form of monetary value. NFTs allow groups to materialize unique pieces of media and distribute them.

These building blocks are primitives that a new gen of community tools - Myco, Cove.social or Collab.land - acknowledge from scratch. This will let community builders truly shape their only space and make them dynamic environments, like how architects and urbanists design great spaces to work and live.

Simona Pop 🔥 @Sim_Pop

@albiverse @jbrukh Agreed - to maintain momentum of coordination there must be a censorship resistant framework where it can develop as a continuously evolving collaboration.

Individual Needs

Those who are part of the right networks and communities do better than those who aren’t. It has been true forever in most areas of life from science to art to business.

As the online space gets both more hostile and populated ,there is growing incentive for people to hop into communities. Allowing one to benefit from avantages like status/identity, influence, network and knowledge.

Furthermore, the need for belonging is at an all time high. All things that favor social experiences have an edge over the rest these days and communities are in pole position.

That’s it for today but there should be more soon. Which one should we explore next?

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