I think it’s very hard to say what makes a community.
I used to manage a forum called VBASkins (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20030101000000*/http://vbaskins.com) before the domain name was lost. I joined it somewhere between 2004 and 2005 (meaning I was ~13 years old) and quickly went from user to moderator to full administrator.
On the surface people were just dropping in and out to download simple graphical skins for their favourite emulator, the VisualBoyAdvance. You could say that was “the goal” of the forum, the goal of most of the visitors and even the goal of some of the regulars.
In our case, however, the goal was also something that brought us there. The goal was not so much the end of the journey, it was something that put you on it. To paraphrase: “that’s not a good community, that’s a side-effect of the goal”.
The regulars started to visit the forum more than they produced new skins. The extra board for random banter got more popular. From a lose bundle of design hobbyists we had formed a real community without any of us noticing. Even now, after the death of the forum, I still have contact with some of the regulars.
I think the thing with communities is that they happen by accident.
I’ve seen people start forums only to form a community. This rarely works. I’ve seen people start forums about subjects that were covered by a million other forums, often fan-forums (think fan-pages).
On the other hand people started websites with a goal. Some had information sharing as goal with being a place for discussion only as a second goal. I think of things like reddit but also the great MetaFilter. The latter has great examples of a close community: helping each other through the weirdest situations. MetaFilter is actually a web blog, not a forum or community central at all, that just happened.
I’ve also seen people start social networking sites. This is almost harder.
A small group of Dutch teenagers worked on their own social network called JustMySelf (http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060101000000*/http://justmyself.nl). They made the news on local TV and the developers where great people but they never made it. It wasn’t a real community. They got their friends to sign up but after that the flow of new users stopped and they were stuck on a website with people they met in real life anyway.
That was a clear case of people aiming for just a community without a goal. It failed. It failed miserably. (And I think they would agree.)
“But in the end, what we want is people to talk to and getting to know people beyond just face facts. You don’t need much to do that other than perseverance.”
It is hard to have any perseverance or get people talking on an internet where everything is fast paced. It’s hard to organise people around something without a goal.
This even goes for this forum. The regulars here certainly have a shared goal, but our goal would be to keep the forum going. With only that as a goal it is hard to gain more following, it’s a goal not easily shared.
(I have the feeling my writing got slightly more incoherent towards the end, sorry ’bout that.)
Martijn added on
Second link, click able this time: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20060101000000*/http://justmyself.nl