I’ve always preferred the smaller community. The world is big and increasingly sterile and faceless, and anything that can be done to preserve the humanity in it is worth doing.
I have never felt at home on a community where it’s impossible to know many members. It’s intimidating to start being a part of it.
Give me a good active community where we all know each other, have fun, can support each other. One that has around 30-40 active members daily with around 250 posts a day. That’s perfect for me.
On smaller communities you have room for creating topics, on bigger communities, every topics seem to be already discussed, therefore you might not find appropriate topics to interact and engage. However, smaller communities have lesser activities and you might find them like ghost town sometimes.