What format makes an online community work? - Weekly Paths Intersection

Allen has built the Ausna platform but isn’t sure what belongs on it, or why anyone would feel pulled to use it. Once it was done, he said, it wasn’t clear how people move around inside it, and it doesn’t spark much drive yet — so the format still has to be worked out.

From asking around, he sees two reasons people come: connection and companionship, and making something of their own. Underneath both is wanting to be seen, and to see other people’s human authority — the term he keeps using for what makes a person distinct from others or from AI: character, wisdom, experience, or the fuller humanhood that makes you feel you actually know someone, how they approach a project, what they’re struggling with now. Ausna, he said, is meant to be both a community and a scenario people return to that’s hard to find on other social media. Talking with Samantha the day before, he’d focused on discussion as the format, because discussion produces that authority on its own: you know who you’re talking to, and the curiosity and passion are real, in both the sharing and the asking. Making “content” feels performative the moment the audience is a public you can’t see — a problem Samantha has too: she wants to make things that show her full humanhood but can’t find a format that feels natural and that she’s proud of afterward.

Youyang, who organized communities at CYC and 706, said the harder question is what field you’re actually providing — what self-worth people realize by coming, what the value-calling is. In the communities he ran, the support that brought people back wasn’t material; it was mostly psychological. And the ones that stayed robust were usually just larger: past a certain number, people’s own initiative feeds a network — you lend a hand, I lend a hand — and the hand-in-hand structure sediments and hardens, even as it keeps flowing. A small, fixed group gets none of that for free. Where a big co-living community offers a dazzling range of people to connect with, a small one offers few, so its relationships run longer and demand more of each person.

Vasiliy said that under any ideology, you are building a social group, and social groups run on trust and affinity, which usually form in person. By that measure this isn’t a group yet — it’s separate people meeting online occasionally, one of the hardest ways to start. So it needs deliberate work, and he was specific: pick three or four pairs based on what people wrote on their pages and what you know of them, and propose they talk one-on-one — Allen introduces two people who should meet. And wherever a few members share a city, meet offline; that does more than almost anything. He was honest that by default none of this happens — he hasn’t read half the member pages himself. The glue between him and Allen exists because they’ve talked enough and hold adjacent values; between him and most others it doesn’t yet, and that’s true of nearly everyone in the group.

The medium sets a hard limit, Youyang said: on a video call only one person talks at a time, and everyone else goes half-present, so whatever the platform becomes has to work against that. Within that window the natural unit is conversation — and specifically the question. Each person brings one they actually care about, and the group thinks it through, using the collective intellect to spark something new. He noticed that asking and answering is also how we work with AI — you prompt, it replies — and asked what makes this different. Only that the people here have real lives, bodies, lived experience to answer from and echo against.

Allen added that the conversation has to rest on something the people in it care about, and caring includes caring who is speaking and why. That’s the difference from a fight in a YouTube comment section, where people may be invested in the topic but not in each other, and some care about neither. When you can see who’s talking and what’s at stake for them, the same hour is both humane and a way of learning who’s actually in the group. For it to stay alive, he thinks it needs two things at once: a main thread that starts the conversation, and a free space for detours, open to whatever comes up spontaneously — it might go off-topic, and that’s fine, because that’s how emergence works.

Youyang flagged the risk. A conversation slides toward whoever is most passionate; the rest follow along, suppress their own thoughts, and tire, and if the subject is heavy it never ends. Keeping it in everyone’s concern rather than one person’s is facilitation, and it doesn’t automate. He pointed to the T-group discipline of staying in the here-and-now, which shields the room from any one person’s long personal history or runaway enthusiasm and gives everyone a turn to respond and contribute — not a model to copy, but something to borrow. Allen wants it freer than that, respecting people’s agency, but with enough facilitation to carry a topic forward, and with the right mechanics — like the forum his school built, where reaction buttons, a raise-hand button, and a running text channel did a lot of the work.

Lu Renjie’s own project is why the format matters to him. For twelve years he’s been rebuilding the Shan Hai Jing, the I Ching, and the Huangdi Neijing — the three books of heaven, earth, and humanity — as a way to see the essence of the world from another vantage. Trained in oil painting and well-read in Western philosophy, he turned to Chinese culture; the West, he said, goes extraordinarily deep at a single point, and yin-yang and the five elements exist whether or not you acknowledge them. He works on an international platform because in China these things can’t be said plainly — say one true thing and it can cost you; it gets labeled superstition. The book gathers 800-plus sculptures, a 31,000-character translation from oracle-bone script, over 3,000 totems, and an eight-meter hand-drawn map. A Christian friend once asked him where the altruism in this was. His answer: a scripture left unread on a shelf slowly dies — we all know what Jesus looks like, but not the faces of Yan Di, Nüwa, or Fuxi — so carrying these books into a form young people can accept is the altruism.

Lu’s proposal for the gatherings: the big titles — humanity, faith, the future — lose focus, so start each time from one small, exact question, go layer by layer, and let the small questions accumulate, harmonious but not uniform, into the large theme. He knows a good question when he has one. That afternoon he’d spent two hours with a friend on nothing more than “to expect, or not to expect,” and reached “seeing the mountain is no longer the mountain.” Years ago, an ancient-astronomy group on QQ — four or five people — spent a whole session on whether one Han-dynasty calendar divided into three parts or four, and he went home and wrote a paper. The point is the question mark: give him one and he can build; without one, he can only state what he does. He once asked Ceto, an another Ausna member a hypothetical — a gun, her and her partner, one of you must die, how do you choose — and where most people answer “I’ll go, you live,” she said she’d first sit down and talk it over with him; that answer alone ran another two hours, out to why yin-yang works the way it does.

His open difficulty is that he doesn’t know how people outside China think — what they believe, whether they’ll accept a perspective beyond Jesus or Allah, whether they care at all. What surprised him is that the West seems more superstitious than he expected; some foreigners knew things about the Chinese zodiac that he didn’t. Allen’s read: it’s real but concentrated in small groups, not the whole population. The hippies revere nature — solarpunk, Youyang added, grows out of that same return-to-nature root — and there’s a magic-and-spirituality world, often women-centered. Western thinking tends to be more literal and direct: rather than build an abstract system, people reach for concrete aids, which is why there’s so much magic paraphernalia to buy — tools to enter the state, rather than cultivation to be practiced. His advice to Lu was not to arrive as someone promoting a culture; that reads as a sales pitch and people close up. Let the old ideas surface inside a concrete question that needs them. And for young people, Chinese culture is no longer the obstacle it was — Chinese medicine, Chinese-style cooking, makeup, and dress are all trending, and warmly.

This is behind Lu’s plan. Starting next week he’ll livestream from the dark, empty fourth floor of his building — roughly 500 square meters — under the title “Creating the World,” building a mountain from the Shan Hai Jing by hand, stacking wooden chopsticks one by one, drawing and sculpting live, and telling each creature’s myth as it goes up: the nine-tailed fox as he raises Qingqiu, and so on. The internet rewards seeing over hearing, he said, so the hands doing the work carry it; over a month he’ll fill the whole floor with his 800 finished beasts, and take live requests — draw a dragon, sculpt one. He won’t mention yin-yang or the five elements in the open; that’s for private conversation, the way hanfu spread — beautiful first, and then whoever wants to learn, learns. Preaching it inside a hanfu stream would be foolish, and no one would listen.

On making this repeatable, Youyang suggested the spotlight can be curated. A podcast, in fact, fits the efficiency Vasiliy was after: a host to open the topic, one guest in the spotlight to lead it, others joining the discussion — three roles, planned with the main guest ahead of time. The structure protects the quieter people: someone like Samantha, who tends to listen, often finds the time gone before she’s spoken, but as the session’s main guest she’d have it by design. A focused question, he repeated, is a better entry than a big abstraction like human nature or faith, because a concrete exchange reflects the larger thing while a broad one is hard to take anywhere deep. Allen would keep it lightweight — a short podcast, not the hour-long kind, self-generated — facilitated by hand at first and systematized only gradually, from gathering interest to settling a topic to laying in background, with asynchronous layers around each conversation where someone like Lu drops in research: the platform tilted toward a kind of think tank. Samantha underlined how tight the one-speaker-at-a-time format is — five people and the time is gone — and that whatever it becomes has to genuinely help people.

For Youyang the limit of all this is plain: people can’t be replaced by automation. However much of the coordination gets systematized, the organizer’s core value is life influencing life, people connecting people — not finding a rope to tie a group together.