What The New Facebook Groups Mean For Community

Facebook released a new version of Groups. The key change: Groups are now built to facilitate real-world groups and communities that already exist, getting back to Facebook’s early mission of helping you connect with the people you actually know.

This confirms something I’ve been thinking about: macro community is the product of micro communities.

A church meets every Sunday – that’s the macro community. But it’s not the Sunday service itself that holds that community together. It’s the subsets – the small groups, the friendship clusters, the teams – where people exchange life on a deeper level.

The strength of the macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the bonds between people within them, and the bonds that link these micro communities together.

Facebook’s new Groups acknowledge this. Rather than one community where I broadcast to everyone, I now have spaces where co-owned content can exist – where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.

This is important. It’s a move toward how community actually works in real life.