Interesting question. I have some thoughts, but expect there will be some disagreement on this front. Communities will always self-select in some sense. Choosin

Interesting question. I have some thoughts, but expect there will be some disagreement on this front. Communities will always self-select in some sense. Choosing to include oneself within community X, as you've put it above, is a form of self-selection. IRL it's limited by the number of people you can meaningfully fit in one place (contingent on the activity), digitally it's limited by what you can meaningfully access that represents the things you're interested in. Both spaces are affected by the mood of the community itself, with more or less hostile participants shaping the type of people willing to attend the forum. Be lassez faire with your policies, and the louder or more belligerent attitudes reign. Use highly rigid community policies and your participants will be limited in the range of available discussions. Both shape the community in different ways. What I suspect you're after is merely a social forum setting where particular subcultures don't become a hegemonic monoculture. You can't really 'fix' that per se, but you can provide greater opportunity for social forking within a forum. Provide users more autonomy within the forum to create their own aligned but separate spaces, and you are more likely to provide space for this holistic community that you're after.