I don't think I've ever seen that. What I have seen is non-sponsored people referring to "the [brand] community" or "the [product] community" as a shorthand way of saying they discuss brand or product with other people with that shared interest on a dedicated Discord server or forum. The Sega community, the Final Fantasy community, etc.
There are many more like this. In fact, it's almost an unwritten rule to create a 'community.domain.tld' with Discourse for a self-hosted projects.
But I don’t like feeling like I am being spoken for, or have it automatically assumed that everyone partaking in something all share a set of values or community-wide beliefs.
Even this has been eroding, the amount of comments made by bots I see across reddit/Twitter has increased exponentially since the 2010s. It only got worse after LLMs.
Reminds me of back when people would slap Apple logos on non-Apple work devices.
Sometimes there are communities in these spaces - NUMTOTs or small Discord servers. Other times its just marketing foo foo.
We haven't ever lived in a world where not being "privacy-conscious" in a social setting could mean any of the following if that privacy is compromised by a corporation:
- Someone constructed a whole fake online presence using my data
- Someone used generative AI to make fake photos and videos of me doing things
- Someone has access to my bank accounts and all of my personal communications
- ...
We used to think of privacy as something that exists between people. Now we think of it as something that is mediated by corporations.
I have never heard of the second interpretation. The second sentence should in my opinion rather be: "Now we think of it as something that is violated by corporations."
You can’t have conversation in your community without them being public either. Saying anything in discord is just as public as on the middle of a busy shopping street.
A couple of them let me install my own apps and use the API, which is disturbing, but most either don't or use the free Slack tier and have maxed out the number of apps that can be installed.