Can You Scale Cozy Communities?
If a community gets bigger, will it lose its magic? How can you preserve the coziness? Over the years, our clients have asked us these questions many different ways. Today, we’ll discuss how we think about cozy communities—and whether they can scale.
Our team first heard the term “cozyweb” from Venkatesh Rao in 2019. Later, we encountered an entire movement on Discord and other platforms to preserve “cozy spaces” on the internet, where users can gather in invite-only platforms free from the gaze of strangers and advertisers.
Those who care about the cozy web want to shelter their online interaction and instead participate in small gathering spaces that feel warm, relaxed, ephemeral, and intimate. These spaces tend to be closer to communities than the larger web (though not always).
But cozy web proponents are not the only ones who care about this concept. Every community builder we know wants a sense of “coziness” in their work. Businesses, spiritual communities, neighborhood clubs, and all kinds of groups fear what happens if their group grows too large and too open. So: Can you scale cozy? And, if so, how do you do the seemingly impossible?
The Hunger for Coziness
Kelly: Why are we so hungry for cozy? Is it something unique to this moment?
Carrie: Let’s define “cozy” first. Rao describes the cozyweb as existing in “high-gatekeeping” spaces like “slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.”
We can define “cozy communities” as small, private, loosely governed but highly curated communities. Cozy insinuates intimacy, safety, and a feeling of belonging.
The hunger for cozy is part of a larger cultural shift that stems from the realities of our world right now, one marked by...
Information uncertainty
Rampant, opaque data tracking by advertisers
The training of LLMs on most of the social web (i.e., Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook)
Loneliness at epidemic levels
Distrust of other humans and institutions at record levels
Of course, we want cozy, sheltered spaces far away from all this! The hunger for cozy speaks to the longing to matter, to be part of something, to find people who get us. And to get away from the noise that distracts us from finding peace and connection.
Should we fear community growth?
Kelly: What kinds of fears do people have when it comes to scaling their communities?
Carrie: When we think of cozy communities, we think of spaces where everybody knows your name, to borrow from Cheers. Or if not everybody, then at least most people. There’s a sense that you’re known and that you know others in return.
That’s not logistically possible once a community gets to be a certain size. When it comes to fears around growth, we hear a lot of the following:
Loss of the intimacy that made the community so special
Offending or harming existing members
Not being able to keep up with everyone equally
Reduction in the quality of contributions and activity
Kelly: Are those fears founded? Can we scale cozy?
I do think those fears have a foundation, but there are ways to scale cozy. We have to stop thinking of a cozy community as simply “small” and shift our mindset to focus on how we can create coziness within any size community. In Building Brand Communities, we teach the Campfire Principle, and to me, this is the way to scale cozy.
Campfire spaces are spaces where everyone has the time, permission, and space to share. Campfires can—and must—be created within communities to allow small groups of people to connect. You can embed campfire experiences into any size of community.
Yes, the group needs to be small in a campfire space, but that’s not all (we’ve all been to small events that feel anything but cozy). The group needs someone in charge to tell everyone what to expect, give them explicit permission to have deeper conversations, and keep the space safe enough for everyone. Recently, we created a campfire space at a large event by hosting a small pre-event workshop, planning activities that got people out of their seats and talking in groups of 3 or 4 (a collaging exercise, for example), and where we could hold the space, set conversational principles for safety and intimacy (shoutout to oops, ouch, whoa!), and give permission for people to be their whole selves, repair if needed, and get out of their comfort zone.
For another example, consider how an enormous global organization like Harley-Davidson scales cozy by hosting local meetups (these tend to be 10-20 folks, but that varies by location) at dealership locations, with specific guidelines and training for a constantly rotating system of leaders to host them.
Or, a more techy example: An organization like Spotify has millions of users, thousands of community members, and only a handful of folks in its Star program for whom it creates exclusive experiences. Amazon’s AWS does the same across multiple community programs. These might not be what we consider “cozy,” and there may be much room for improvement, but the bones are good.
How to scale cozy
Kelly: I love a campfire moment. We’ve also learned from firsthand client research that community growth often means investing energy into:
Refreshing and upholding your community guidelines
Formalizing and leaning into your moderator team
Carrie: Absolutely, we need to keep the experience safe and consistent and that can only be done by solidifying the guidelines and deciding how to enforce them when (not if) needed.
Ultimately, any community that’s growing has to ask itself: does growth harm or help our mission? If the latter, then yes, not only can you scale cozy, but if your community is growing, you have to scale cozy in order to uphold the integrity of the community. Keep things cozy with campfire experiences, and go forth and grow!
Now we want to ask you: What are your approaches to scaling coziness in your community? Have you experimented with any initiatives that have been particularly effective?
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P.S. We are now formally offering Circle platform community implementation services to businesses and creators who want to launch their dream communities. Find out more on our new Circle launch services page and reach out for more details.
