People often conflate community with audience. A key distinction:

Audiences are one-to-many

Communities are many-to-many

It’s not a community if people don’t interact with each other.

And this is what makes communities potentially more scaleable and efficient than audience platforms.

The platform (this includes creators) doesn’t have to do all the work.

Sometimes starting with an audience is easier and a smart first step toward building a community later on.

I expect many broadcast platforms (i.e. tools used to communicate with an audience) will vertically integrate community building functionality in the coming months.

An obvious example of this opportunity is in Substack.

Some writers like @lennysan have a private Slack group for his paid subscribers.