I'll just wait for your articles to show up on my feed. Or maybe for a well written book on this topic.

From 2016-2019, I belonged to a forum called Writerbeat. Ostensibly, it was about writers interacting with writers about writing. And there was some of that, with excerpts of the books we had written. Sometimes we did an analysis of each other's work.

But politics and current events were the more common articles. And the site owner/moderator was always recruiting from various parts of the spectrum. It was no echo chamber. We even had a couple of white supremacists for a while.

The tone was reasonably civil, kind of like a debate format, where we discussed the issues, not the characters. Sometimes things got a little rough, but too rough got reprimands from the moderator. She did kick a couple of people off the forum.

One rule was that we had to wait 72 hours before posting another article. While that helped ensure a higher quality of articles, it meant we were commenting on other articles while waiting for our 72 hours to be up. So most articles generated 20 or more comments in the threads. And that is how we kind of got to know each other.

We developed a little community. It was a wonderful experience. I am still in occasional touch with about 10 of these people.

While there was a core of about 40 people during the time I was there, the owner was always recruiting new people. Maybe another 40 were just as active, but they disappeared within a year. And maybe another 40 trying things out and not sticking too long.

I thought this forum was a good experiment for the Dunbar number. The number of active contributors were about 100-150. It almost seemed that a certain size encouraged more people to drop out.

The owner could not expand more than Dunbar would allow. Subscription fees were out of the question. She eventually shut the site down.

For sure, nothing on Medium comes close to the community we had on Writerbeat.