It's a community, like HN is, but accessed via ssh instead of http. So it's a community where the active participants necessarily can navigate a shell, irc client, tmux/screen, and maybe even prefer socializing in that environment vs. something like the web or mobile apps. Access is also a privilege which can be taken away. So everyone you interact with there is either new or cooperative and mature enough to not get banned from a shared resource with very few safeguards preventing abuse.

~town is by far the largest multiuser system I've logged into in the last decade, not that I've been looking. It kind of reminds me of the university UNIX systems I dialed into in the 90s, fingering users to read their plans, updating my .plan, running ytalk to chat with friends, email w/pine, and usenet w/tin.