Communities are hard. This is true whether you’re talking about in-person communities or online communities, but for right now I’m mostly talking about online communities. They’re hard to set up and cultivate, they’re hard to maintain and manage. The mechanics of an online community isn’t really the hard part, though there’s certainly some technical expertise to get them set up properly. What makes them hard is that a community is inherently made of people. There may be some sort of cohesive glue that brings folks together, to start to bond and connect and create that sense of community, but it’s still a jumbled pile of different individuals with individual needs, desires, personalities, and challenges. Even assuming you manage to get everyone moving in one rough direction and start cultivating community, keeping them moving in the same direction and keeping that cohesion… well. There’s a reason so many communities fizzle out before too long (or worse, explode from internal drama).
I think we’ve all experienced it to one degree or another. So, when you finally find a community that you like, and that seems healthy, you appreciate it. I really, really appreciated the XOXO community.
What’s XOXO?
XOXO was a sort of experimental conference/festival that celebrated and brought together creatives from all over the world, primarily folks who are involved in creating things on the internet in one fashion or another. The operative term there is “was” — after over a decade of conferences, the folks who put it together were ready to move on and (after a several year gap due to COVID) put on one last event this past August, out in Portland, Oregon. It’s been one of my favorite events since its inception, and I’ve written about it on several occasions on here.
One of the big things that set it apart as an event was the thoughtfulness and care that went into every aspect of the event. They invested a lot of effort into making sure it was inclusive, finding sponsors who were okay with it not being some big brand-palooza to help keep the costs of tickets down, running attendance as a lottery so it wasn’t a matter of who had the time and money to buy as soon as tickets went on sale, setting funds aside for making sure folks who might not be able to attend otherwise might still be able to go with a discounted ticket. Their code of conduct was a gold standard for what event codes of conduct should look like, and they actually enforced it, quietly and professionally, when occasions came up. Also lots of just practical touches: the event swag and branding was always on point, the events at the conference ran well and with very few technical difficulties. They even made awesome custom non-alcoholic drinks each year so you could mingle and socialize without the social drinking pressure that’s prevalent at a lot of other events.
So take that sort of thoughtfulness and attentiveness, and apply it to their online presence as well, and you start to get an inkling of what made their online community special.
XOXO the MMO
So for some historical context, around the second or third XOXO, the conference managed to snag Slack as a sponsor. One of the things Slack provided as part of this sponsorship was a fully functional, paid Slack instance for XOXO conference attendees. The only way to get access to the Slack was if you’d attended one of the conferences (and not retroactively – just from that event onward). Even with that sort of exclusivity, it ended up growing to ~5,000 people over the years, and it was active. There were channels for basically any topic you could think of, and at least in all of the channels I was part of, folks were always thoughtful and there to participate, not troll.
Can you imagine that for a second? A whole community of people where things rarely got more troll-y than some light snark, and if you had questions about something, people supported each other instead of playing games of oneupmanship and nerdsniping? I found so many interesting sites and games and stories through there. Interesting people.
This was in large part due to the culture the conference tried to cultivate, combined with a variety of volunteers, and a commitment from the owners to create a safe space for folks to share online. This created its own sort of circle of trust — generally if a link to a product or service or thing was getting shared on XOXO, it was probably quality stuff made by good people. I’ve referred folks for jobs based on them being part of that community, and I know for a fact that I’m not the only one.
All Things
Communities often end up having a lifespan. It’s just how it goes. Maybe the site or service hosting the community shuts down. Maybe there’s a change in management or a rift that causes participants to leave. Maybe the admins just get tired and can’t invest the time and energy into maintaining it they once did. Regardless, a community is a living organism, and it has a lifespan. The XOXO community is no different in that respect. With the official end of the conference, the decision was made to shutter the XOXO Slack as well. It wasn’t an abrupt shutdown – we were all given several months notice, and encouraged to work together to develop some new spaces, and the community absolutely rose to the occasion, building proof-of-concept spaces using a variety of platforms, working to build consensus on what they wanted these new spaces to be. I wasn’t as active a participant as I might have liked (life and work were keeping me busy), but I was able to trust the community to land on something.
The community managed to make new spaces for folks to migrate to before the deadline, though it’ll be something of a diaspora, as different folks end up preferring one platform over another. That’s okay, though. I imagine at some point, some of them may even open up to non-XOXOers, though for now they remain exclusive (and why I’m not naming them or even what platforms were picked). It feels right that we’d take this community and go out and spread.
RIP
Today, the Slack officially shut down. All channels were archived. A lot of us were on when the archiving was happening, as our phones and computers sent us Slack notifications as yet another channel we were part of got archived. We joked and shared gratitude for the space and the people in it, shared memes and songs. It felt like sharing stories at the end of the world, as the stars around you blinked out. And then eventually, the last channel was archived, and it was done.
I’ve always found these sorts of communal endings interesting. There have been a few MMOs that have had this shared experience – ask folks who played the Matrix Online and were on when it closed, or when Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 shut down. They’ll tell you that it was a unique and special and bittersweet experience to be there at the end. It’s not the same as a bond you might feel with another person, or a pet, but there’s a bond there nonetheless. After the time and energy and care you put into it (and hopefully got back!), how couldn’t there be?
I’m going to miss it. And I’m excited to see what comes next.