Building Communities

This is a series of lessons learned while building the IrregularChat community — onboarding, security, resilience, and moderation. Each part stands alone; together they capture how a trust-first community runs in practice.

This will serve as a guide and discussion for the lessons learned while building the irregularchat community, expanding services, arranging events, and turning good ideas to effects.

Questions I intend to answer are here but any comments will get an answer as well:

1. Why should you start a community?
2. When should you start a community?
3. Shaping a community?
4. Things to avoid when community shaping?
5. What services are useful for a community?

Start here

Secure Comms & Signal Reality: Building for the Way It Works — The prologue. Why Signal, why the constraints we work within, and what platform reality forces every choice in this series. Read this first to understand the why before the how.

In this series

1. Part 1 — Onboarding New Members — Two pathways for adding people to Signal communities: member-vouched and self-requested. How the bonafides workflow protects user data, enables admin verification, and keeps onboarding consistent.

2. Part 2 — Verifying Safety-Number Changes — Why safety-number changes matter, the 24-hour verification window, the exact prompts we send, and how to communicate removals to preserve trust instead of breeding rumors.

3. Part 3 — An Admin Dashboard for Resilience — Avoiding single points of failure by abstracting Authentik IdM behind a chat-based dashboard. Why pre-created accounts beat recovery links, and how Cloudflare Access keeps admin tooling locked down.

4. Part 4 — Managing Off-Topic & Disruptive Messages — Signal is single-threaded — only 1-3 active discussions before chaos. The off-topic pressure valve, public reminder → private invite → admin pause escalation ladder, and why politics needs its own opt-in space.

5. Part 5 — Text-Replacement Macros for Moderators — Native macOS / iOS / Android text replacement turns yyreq, yyinvite, yygtg into full community-approved prompts. Less typing, more consistency, no extra bots required.

6. Part 6 — Desire Paths & When to Pave a New Chat — Let members carve their own routes through the community. The 20% / 15-member critical-mass rule for forking a new chat, the Pareto-driven signal for when a side conversation is actually a subcommunity, and why guiding beats dictating.

Want to start your own community? The whole stack we use is open-source — see Irregularpedia for the self-host guide, or fork the chat-based community dashboard.