The core of a community is consistent interaction with community members. The easiest way to develop this is to have some kind of regular meeting that people have a reason to attend. A bar can be a community, a church can be a community, a library can be a community, a park can be a community, an online game can be a community, a web forum can be a community. You can also have a community without a specific regular meeting place, as long as the members are willing to make the effort to meet in different places (this is more difficult, and works best for small groups of friends). What matters is that people keep showing up and spending time together.

It becomes a real community when the members begin to care about each other, so much so that they will go out of their way to ensure the well-being of other members. This takes time to develop, and benefits greatly from community leaders who set an example of care, which can be as simple as asking how someone is doing and genuinely listening to the answer. It’s easier to do in person because you can often look at someone and know that something is wrong, and they can’t just run away embarrassed without making a scene. It’s harder to do through the Internet, people will simply disappear. Bluntly, the less people have invested personally the more likely they are to just leave.

Churches are actually an instructive example - religious worship has been the center of communities for much of humanity’s past. Small churches tend to build communities very easily because they have:

1. Weekly meetings in a dedicated space - no one has to guess when or where to be, or if anyone else is going to show up
2. Mutual support - the religious aspects of the group encourage members to care for each other
3. Guilt tripping - there’s a lot of peer pressure to show up every week, and social consequences for not doing so

If you want to build a community, try to be that example of a community leader who checks in with others and cares about their well-being. It’s tricky though, trying too hard too fast with this is not socially acceptable and will push people away. Starting out the most important thing is communication and coordination (e.g. making sure people have transportation to and from the meeting). Start small, start simple, and this might seem counterintuitive, try to be the invisible glue that holds it all together. For the community to form, the members must develop relationships with each other that are not dependent on the leader, which means you can’t insert yourself into every relationship within the community - you can’t be everyone’s best friend, you might not even know everyone directly, and that’s okay. You need to facilitate the growth of relationships (by introducing people to each other) but not be the center of all of them (single point of failure). If you’re successful, the community will grow beyond yourself and take on its own form, which may be different from what you visualized at the start.

Also keep in mind that there’s a degree of getting lucky required to make this happen. You can set a table and invite people to sit down at it, but you can’t force them. People have to choose to join you, and choose to come back, and that means you have to find people who are in the right place in their lives, the right mindset, and have the time to be involved. Getting lucky typically involves casting a wide net, repeatedly over time, being patient, and accepting failure. Starting from scratch is hard.