You have a goal though:

“As has been alluded to so far, I’ve cut a lot of crap that is standard in forums these days. There won’t ever be signatures or user pages, crowd-spam and the like. People’s “rank” should be known simply from their participation and generosity—their actual deeds, rather than a label. In essence the forums should let humans be humans.”

(source: http://camendesign.com/code/forums#goals)

And I think you will find many people who classify as (semi-)regulars are exactly the people who “come here because they are inspired by [your] work”, especially inspired by your minimalistic work and how you made this forum. The regulars have this forum at heart, their goal is to try see this forum filled with life.

This is also what puts it ahead from the social network project I named in my previous post. There only the creators had making the thing active as a goal, the users’ goal was to sit around and see what happened. Here the users’ goal is to make things active!

Since you inspired all of us to get around, share your goal and do something I think that’s what made this into a small community.

In my opinion, whatever community it is, it forms from a goal.