From Destination to Infrastructure: The Quiet Future of Community

When will communities become infrastructure rather than destinations and how should we prepare?

For most of their multi-decade history, online communities have been treated like places you go.

You log in (if needed). You poke around. You see what is new. Maybe you contribute. Maybe you do not. Whatever the case, there is a modicum of intentionally in the act. You chose to seek out that community. You chose to look around. You chose to contribute.

And in that way, I’d consider them a destination. Optional. Intentional. Easy to forget. Just yet another tab or bookmark.

But, infrastructure works very differently.

Have you ever woken up or gone about your day thinking:

• Today, I use electricity!

• I visited the local highway system.

• I choose to leverage the most excellent cell phone towers.

Probably not.

But have you ever woken up or gone about your day and thought:

• Why the feck is the power out!?

• They really need to do something about this highway traffic.

• The reception around here is terrible.

You notice infrastructure only when it breaks, usually while you are already annoyed about something else.

And y’all… communities are quietly heading in that direction. I’d actually argue a lot of communities are already there. But our strategies and collective knowledge? Not quite.

And it’s not because communities are getting bigger or trendier, but because people are running out of patience for places that require extra effort just to be useful. The more work becomes distributed and asynchronous, the less tolerance there is for spaces that demand attention instead of supporting it.

Destinations ask members to show up. Infrastructure shows up for members.

And as someone who has been on this community journey long enough to have run a few destination communities - and now solidly in the land of “I am an infrastructure architect”, this is an uncomfortable transition for many community teams. Destinations reward visibility. Infrastructure rewards reliability. Destinations feel successful when things are lively. Infrastructure feels successful when nothing remarkable happens at all.

If that sounds underwhelming, it is worth remembering that nobody writes glowing status updates about how well the plumbing performed today (ie, “That toilet flushes so spectacularly!”). And yet, here we are.

Note to self: Go leave a review somewhere on the plumbing just to challenge the system.

You can usually tell which direction a community is leaning by how it integrates into daily life.

• If it requires a dedicated visit, a mental context switch, and a small pep talk to open the tab, it is still a destination.

• If it quietly solves problems, surfaces knowledge at the right moment, or connects the right people without fanfare, it is starting to behave like infrastructure.

Needless to say (gosh, I hope; you knew we were at this point… right?) this shift changes how communities should be designed.

Destinations are optimized for novelty and energy and exploration. Infrastructure is optimized for consistency and load and efficiency. A community that acts as infrastructure has to work on slow days, busy days, and chaotic days without needing to be rebuilt each time. It has to handle spikes without drama and lulls without existential crisis. (And yes, that means the community staff has to be able to handle it without an existential crisis. I’m still working on that one myself.)

It also changes how success is measured.

You do not measure infrastructure by excitement. You measure it by dependency. If the community disappeared tomorrow, what would break? What knowledge would be lost? What relationships would suddenly become much harder to maintain?

And, that is not a dashboard most teams are used to. Preparing for this future means getting comfortable with a few darn humbling realities.

First, the community itself may become less visible even as it becomes more important. When something works reliably, people stop talking about it. This can feel unsettling if you are used to proving value through activity and people saying nice things about you. But obscurity is often the price of usefulness.

Second, events become reinforcements rather than lifelines. They matter, but they no longer carry the entire system on their backs. Think of them less as fireworks and more as routine maintenance.

Third, governance stops being a background concern. Infrastructure fails when no one is clearly responsible for it. Clear stewardship, transparent decisions, and boring but necessary rules suddenly become signs of maturity rather than bureaucracy. Suddenly things like uptime, moderation, escalation procedures, and release readiness are your world.

The communities that endure will not feel like destinations you remember to visit. They will feel like systems you assume are there. Quietly holding shared artifacts. Carrying context forward. Making coordination possible without fanfare. When they work well, they will be easy to overlook and deeply missed the moment they are gone. That is the tradeoff of infrastructure. Less applause. More reliance. And if that feels like a loss, it is worth remembering that the most important structures in our lives are rarely the ones we admire. They are the ones we build everything else on top of.

Go thank your favorite cell phone tower!