I have to confess, when I first really paid attention to the whole idea of community was at SF4 last year in BKK. My initial reaction was why bother, if we have tags? I think the communities haven't developed into the people community as know with a lot of interaction and engagement like on Discord, but more as a dipository for similar posts.
That isn't a bad thing to be honest, especially with OCD's push to support, more and more niche content creators are getting more exposure.
Many community leaders do it as a passion for the love of their hobby or to achieve their aim to launch their project. And many don't realise it actually cost to run these communities. Like for example Pinmapple has to pay for hosting fees every year, as well as HBD40 every month to access the Sql database.
If we didn't have support from the community, particularly some whales who've been brilliant in supporting us, the project would have died a long time ago as the last thing we want to do is to dig into author's hard earned rewards to fund us.
I was the same, when they first started. Probably didn't help that few people were using them. I also imagined it might take away the need for discord, but it didn't. Now people are using the niche ones more, they are becoming more useful as a depository for similar posts. I find them most useful from the other side when curating, however, to have them all in one place to go through. I still have to search the tags for the HomeEdders ones, but not so much for #naturalmedicine.