Comment by sleepybrett

Smaller communities too.

I grew up in... slightly rural america in the 80s-90s, we had probably a couple of dozen local BBSes the community was small enough that after a bit I just knew who everyone was OR could find out very easily.

When the internet came along in the early 90s and I started mudding and hanging out in newsgroups I liked them small where I could get to know most of the userbase, or at least most of the posing userbase. Once mega 'somewhat-anonymous' (i.e. posts tied to a username, not like 4chan madness) communities like slashdot, huge forums, etc started popping up and now with even more mega-communities like twitter and reddit. We lost something, you can now throw bombs without consequence.

I now spend most of my online time in a custom built forum with ~200 people in it that we started building in an invite only way. It's 'internally public' information who invited who. It's much easier to have a civil conversation there, though we still do get the occasional flame-out. Having a stable identity even if it's not tied to a government name is valuable for a thriving and healthy community.