Discord servers are the closest. People do build up friendships, relationships, enemyships, and a public persona / reputation within a Discord server.

Discord is centralized, heavily censored, and surveilled, so it can’t serve this purpose for many communities (such as most of the ones in which I participate).

My limited experience with discord was either no activity at all, or so much activity it’s hard to follow what’s going on.

I suppose I never found the right place

I’m sure an anthropologist can clarify, but once a community reaches a certain size, it seems that emergent properties take over.

They did, and it’s called Reddit. Then it got enshittified.

Communities don't scale. This is the reason why nobody has done and why you couldn't get rich forming communities. Communities are handcrafted to accommodate the unique personalities of the people involved. Communities involve activities where a handful of people can socialize and bond. A service with a million users can never become a community because our social/grouping instincts don't work on that scale. A community should always be a few dozens of core people, with maybe a larger number of non-core people participating occasionally.

[delayed]

Indeed, I think the size of the internet these days is partly the problem. The community in GameSpy and Zone were super small from my memory. We had crappy websites that tracked singles and team ladders. Then Steam came along.

If their goal is becoming rich, then this is doomed from the very start. How would it be monetized? Ads? Great, then you have no incentive to actually build a healthy community. Signup fee? Not going to work, way too much of a barrier.