Problem
You've been thinking about shells lately.
Not metaphorically. Literally just shells. Hermit crabs, specifically, and how they live alone in borrowed houses, upgrading when they outgrow them. But what if every hermit crab had a shell so perfectly engineered, so luxuriously appointed with mother-of-pearl and expandable molding, that they never needed to gather at the shell exchange? What if they just... stayed inside forever?
The wealthier crabs would have the best shells, naturally. Self-cleaning. Temperature controlled. Little windows that filter out the harsh UV rays. They'd never need to venture out for the chaotic shell-swapping gatherings where dozens of crabs line up by size, each waiting to upgrade into their neighbor's discarded home. No more vulnerable moments outside of their shells. No more skeptically sizing up their neighbor's architecture.
Just perfect, hermetic seal.
Forever.
Your stomach growls. You realize you've been standing in the grocery store staring at a can of crab meat for eleven minutes.
Solution:
Pizza. Wait, no, let me try again.
The core problem of the Perfect Shell is that there are no forcing functions getting you out of your shell; which means if you aren’t very intentionally interacting with other people, then you will become deeply isolated and not even notice.
Before COVID, people at least socialized with coworkers. Now many don't even have that. Without an intake pipeline for new friendships, your social circle shrinks through attrition until eventually you're just hanging out with your romantic partner all the time.
So what does an intake pipeline for friendships even look like? You need a recurring excuse for the same people to keep showing up - a basketball court, a book club, Thursday night Magic the Gathering at the game store, even just "we all hate our HOA and talk about it over pizza each Tuesday."
But what if your thing is too niche or weird? What if you just really want to argue about prediction markets or 17th century Ottoman poetry or that one discontinued MMORPG from 2003?
Well: you can intentionally create communities from nothing around your weird niche interest! It's not even that hard! It's mostly just mildly annoying! People do it all the time!
DIY Communities I Have Witnessed Or Managed And Reasons I Suspect That Worked
The Minneapolis-St Paul Astral Codex Ten (ACX) Group! Between 5-10 people attend in person each week and something like 100 total members are in the Discord (though only maybe a fifth of those ever post.) I buy everyone pizza, and we talk about stuff. It’s been rolling for about two years and I consider it a huge success!
I inherited the core of this meetup group a couple years ago (it met irregularly) and later made a Discord server for it; the Discord and weekly meetups have allowed me to maintain and build membership with only very minimal advertising.
We frequently hold events at a local Davanni’s Pizza; I like it because even though the pizza is fine I guess it’s quiet and has plentiful seating for groups, and I like to buy everyone pizza since free food is an easy draw.
The intake mechanism for my ACX group is the very-popular Astral Codex Ten blog, which periodically advertises local meetup groups. I also put up a couple of flyers in my apartment complex and every so often I invite people from my dance community who I suspect would be good fits. Speaking of!
The Minneapolis Salsa Bachata Dance (MSBD) community is very healthy and active. I’m not quite sure how many “official members” it has but Dahee (the lady who runs it) is extremely intentional about community building and engagement.
The actual community runs mostly via a WhatsApp group chat since it lets people tap into a set of independent events and people-who-might-attend-those-events as-needed.
The focal point physically is a kitchen/lobby area in the back where regulars hang out between and after classes. People who come regularly and hang out with the regulars get invited into the group chat.
Intake mechanism for MSBD is introductory salsa and bachata classes, as well as intensive workshops on some weekends.
DIY Non-Communities I Have Witnessed
I thought it would be illustrative to call out some places I expected might naturally congeal into communities, but where I have not witnessed this happening.
Rock Climbing at Vertical Endeavors.
People just do parallel play here. You can't socialize while scaling a wall, there's no common area to hang out, and crucially - no set times when the same people show up. You come when you come.
Yoga at Onx + Amelia St Paul.
Yoga is not intrinsically social. People don’t chat while doing Downward Dog. And there’s no lobby where people can naturally congregate before/after class, which means everyone will arrive right on time for the yoga, won’t talk to anybody during yoga, and will pack up immediately after since what else would you do, really? I see the same people there week after week who I am convinced have never said more than a sentence to each other in one sitting.
How To Kick Start A Local Community Oriented Around Whatever
There are five things you need.
ZERO: A thing you’re into. Ideally, really into.
FIRST: A scheduled weekly event no more than two hours in a physical location. You will go there regardless of whether anyone else shows up. This is the Meetup Price. (I've paid it; a couple of times exactly one person showed up to my article meetup. We chatted for a while and it was fine. Worst-case scenario, you're sitting in a pizza place alone. Bring a book.)
SECOND: A group chat for chatting and organizing in-person events. You will be posting there before anyone else is active; this is the Group Chat Price.
THIRD: An intake mechanism so your group sees new people to offset inevitable attrition of members.
FOURTH: Some kind of official schedule such that people know about time/location changes.
The Group Chat
Group chats are the lifeblood of a community and serve, as far as I know, three main functions:
Group chats keep people connected, even if life happens and they can’t attend a meetup physically for a while. I see people disappear from the meetup for months, then come back because they never really left the Discord.
The group chat becomes an incredibly convenient place for members to organize unrelated events with other people they know and like.
The flipside is that anxious or lazy people now have a steady feed of stuff to do with people they already like.
The Cold Start Problem: Creating A Group Chat
When I inherited the ACX group, it didn’t have a group chat so I decided to start up a Discord community. I made myself a community logo with DALL-E and invited everyone I thought might plausibly be interested, which included everyone who went to the old in-person meetups of the previous iteration of the ACX group.
The Discord server was silent, because of course it was. Every group chat starts dead. Someone has to be willing to talk into the silence until it stops being silent.
So, I started using it as a link and shower-thoughts aggregator. I'd just post stuff into the void. I’d tag specific people, like: "Hey Sarah, you mentioned being into prediction markets, thought this was cool." Early on, I made sure to respond to literally everything anyone posted; even just a reaction emoji or a "huh, interesting."
This phase is weird. You feel like a street performer who hasn't drawn a crowd yet but has to keep juggling anyway, but what you're actually doing is demonstrating that this is a space where things happen. People need to see that posting is normalized, and that if they post a thing, this posting will be rewarded with engagement and pleasant conversation. And it will be, because you are personally ensuring this happens.
Gradually, people started responding to each other instead of just to me. Someone would post a link and someone else (not me!) would comment. Two people would start a side conversation about housing prices or whatever. Inside jokes crop up. At some point I forgot about the discord for like a week and came back to a whole bunch of conversation that happened in my complete absence and it was awesome.
The Weekly Meetup
Communities exist because there is a specific time and place that people show up each week.
I suspect it’s necessary to have meetups be at least once a week, since that causes people to bake the meetup into their schedule instead of just going whenever they feel like it.
That means you can’t cancel the events without a really good reason. “Didn’t get a critical mass of people this week” is not a good enough reason because it generates uncertainty looming over a given meetup about whether it actually happens. This kills meetup groups.
The Cold Start Problem: Creating A Meetup
When I started my own weekly ACX meetups I initially had a group of ten or so people I suspected would be interested in attending from a different ACX meetup, combined with 2 close friends who could be relied upon to attend the first couple of get-togethers.
I think it’s extremely important to accept, in your gut, that your first couple of sessions could have just one or two people show up. Do not cancel because of non-attendance. The stability of the event is what causes people to bake it into their schedule; a typical antipattern (commonly seen in Dungeons and Dragons groups) is a theoretical weekly get-together where it’s continuously postponed because one person or another can’t make it. It’s crucial for the health of the meetup that at least one person make ~every event, and at least while the meetup is in its fragile starting stages that person is you.
Member Intake Pipelines
The kind of people you get attending your meetups is largely a consequence of how and where you advertise them; this forms an implicit but incredibly powerful selection effect that will rapidly manifest in the culture of your group.
My own meetup group is pretty freeform, we basically just hang out and grab pizza and chat every week. It advertises mostly via the popular Astral Codex Ten substack. This means people who attend are strongly filtered for enjoying that blog and that gets you a remarkably specific and interesting subset of humanity, with a very distinctive culture in common— they’re pretty much all either bay area rationalists or rationalist-adjacent even though we’re all living in Minnesota.
Minneapolis Salsa-Bachata Dance is kind of an interesting case because it’s a business and so wants to get as wide a distribution as possible, so they advertise on Facebook (among other places) which means they are casting a very wide net.
So they get all sorts of different types of people… in the intro classes. However, the grind of learning to dance filters heavily. You either started as a kid (especially common for Latinos) or you're willing to be terrible for 200+ hours (especially common for entrepreneurs, engineers and other nerds). Plus, you need $160/month disposable income (~the cost of a membership). The result: studio regulars are entrepreneur types, nerds, and dedicated normies who just really love dancing.
One can also advertise through Meetup.com; this works and can get you people, but Meetup.com is popular and doesn’t really filter for any kind of person. Take note. Speaking of,
Unfortunately You Are The Gatekeeper, Sorry Bout That
If someone intolerable joins your meetup, then as organizer it’s on you to have a Come To Jesus talk with the troublemaker (or even expel them), which is awkward and unpleasant but must be done.
I had the misfortune of attending an Effective Altruist meetup group that was singlehandedly murdered by a very gregarious but deeply unpleasant lady who mostly just wanted to talk about (1) racial politics from her incredibly specific and controversial angle and (2) a business idea of hers that sounded suspiciously like a pyramid scheme, and she continued to monopolize conversations for several sessions until people stopped showing up. The meetup founder was (I suspect) conflict-averse, and the rest of us felt it wasn't our place to step in.
This lady came from Meetup.com and probably represents an inappropriate amount of how I view the Meetup.com platform on an emotional level. Ah well.
It’s A Pain In The Ass Sometimes But Super Worth It
Look, beyond the obvious joy you are bringing into other peoples’ lives, there's an amount of social capital you get basically for free. You become “the person who runs the Minneapolis-St Paul ACX meetup”, which sounds more impressive than “person who buys pizza and shows up every week,” and sounds way more impressive than “guy who has watched every single season of Top Chef.” It's kind of a social arbitrage opportunity; minimal effort for surprisingly outsized reputational returns.
But really, you already know why it's worth it. You're reading an essay about building community because you feel the isolation and desperately want someone to talk about old British poets with.
Mull it over.
Fine post. Generated this evil idea about how to deal with unwelcome personalities showing up from meetup.com: ask for their favorite meetups and move your meetup to schedule on the same time.
Good post!