Not all communities start with a forum. In fact, plenty of online spaces have grown and thrived without ever using traditional forum software. Some communities evolve within blog comment sections, social media groups, Discord servers, or even wiki discussions.

 

These setups can create different dynamics compared to forums - sometimes more fast-paced, sometimes more tightly knit, sometimes more chaotic.

 

Have you built or been part of a non-forum community?

• How did interaction work?
  
• What were the biggest challenges?
  
• Did you eventually add a forum, or was the format enough on its own?
  

Would love to hear your experiences! What worked, what didn’t, and what you think forum-based communities could learn from these alternative setups. :)

I have a large Facebook group dedicated to talking about This Is Dan Bell, a Youtuber from Baltimore who films abandoned buildings, dying malls, and used to inspect hotel rooms and document just how nasty lower rated hotels are. He even is a member in the group too and there's thousands of people that joined. Though I'm not active on Facebook anymore, so I should give ownership to someone else honestly. I tried opening up a forum alongside the group but out of the thousands in the group only 20 members joined the forum so I stopped paying for the hosting and shut down the forum. FB groups are just too disorganized, I would often have people post the same thing over and over again.

I have a fb page with over 2,000 likes and it was quite active a few years ago.

 

But, I haven’t done anything to do it for a while. It still receives a fair amount of likes and comments.

Yeah, Facebook pages or groups are another form of community that some forget about sometimes.

 

Another one is also gaming communities - I play a few text-based RPG games that have a "community" in the sense they have a chatbox, known characters and active chatters who talk on a variety of topics, not just game-related.