Open communities vs Closed communities

I’m in the middle of a tough decision and could really use some input. I am running a small online community for freelance designers on Slack, and while it’s small but growing, I’m at a crossroads when it comes to making the community open to anyone or keeping it closed and invite-only.

Right now, it’s closed, and I feel like that creates a more intimate, trusted environment where members are really engaging with each other. ..But I also wonder if opening it up to the public would help us grow faster and reach more people who could benefit from it. For open communities, I have considered discourse and even plain old vanilla forum software.

On the flip side, I’m worried that if I open it up, it might dilute the quality of discussions or bring in spam, trolls, or people who aren’t as serious about contributing. Also when you have a one-man ship, it’s tough to be on top of spam all the time.

How do you decide whether to keep your community open or closed? Did you start with one and later switch? Happy to discuss 1:1 as well.

I built a closed community at my previous organisation on Slack. The major challenge with building a closed community is that the burden of keeping the community active is always on the community manager.

Slack worked well for us for the first few months. But onboarding members was a constant challenge. We relied on webinars and social media posts to keep our community growing.

Overall, an open community is always a better choice among the two because it solves the problem of community growth.

A closed community works only when you have a constant source of new members and the content created is valuable only to the members of the community.

I am in the SGT timezone if you wish to have a conversation.