Not a authority or student of online communities, but:
In the “real” world, we don’t choose the community of our birth.
The only reason we change communities is because our needs/desires aren’t met in the communities we are in. (our, we, my can be and individual or a family)
Usually changes are driven by needs (education, work, cost of living…)
Our needs/desires change as we mature and we tend to shift from physical need concerns to satisfying our desires that we couldn’t “afford” earlier.
The primary difficulty in leaving communities is that we leave behind friends. Real friends in the sense that they are physical and human. We share a range of humaness with these friends. But we know that new friends await us along with the opportunities we seek.
I don’t know why an online community would be different, except that change isn’t driven by physical needs.
In my case, I was doing a search for something and this site came up, so I checked out the information.
I found the site to be an interesting collection of discussions, so I started chipping in my 2c worth.
The questions fall into 3 groups:
Subjects/issues that are highly interesting and to which I’ll aways respond.
Subjects/issues that I have no interest in
Subjects/Issues that fall in between and may or may not inspire a response.
My participation will likely be based on the ratio of the above categories and if the quantity is sufficient to sustain my interest over time.
Of course there is the development of “relationships” to the extent that I can appreciate comments that specific individuals make about the subject. But the relationships aren’t “real” in the sense that they have no physicality. “Leaving” these “friends” isn’t the same as leaving friends in a real community. There isn’t a fundamental sense of loss.
Moving is optional and easy.