In March 2020, a weird thing happened to how we answered the question “Who are you?”
Before the pandemic, most of us had multifaceted identities. I was the person who went to the gym and lifted weights 6x a week, who took my kids to the park all the time, who volunteered at the school, attended the occasional book club, and who took a break by going grocery shopping on Saturday mornings. For many of us, our sense of self was distributed across multiple domains, including social, familial, recreational, and professional.
The Great Identity Consolidation
Lockdown stripped most of those identities away in a matter of weeks or even days. Even family gatherings and Sunday dinners and holiday traditions moved to Zoom calls or stopped entirely.
Every space where we’d embody our various identities closed. I couldn’t be “the person who deadlifted on Tuesdays” when there was no weightroom open. You can’t be “the parent who knows everyone at school” when school is a URL. You can’t be “the person who always hosts game night” when gathering is prohibited.
Our professional identity didn’t just persist. It intensified, because work didn’t stop. In actuality, for a lot of us it intensified or became the one thing we could control. I lost my job, but I could look for another. For many people, work-from-home meant more hours. Slack channels kept pinging. Standups kept happening. Deadlines didn’t pause for a pandemic.
Suddenly, “developer” or “designer” or “product manager” wasn’t just what we did. It became almost the entirety of who we were.
Not by choice. By elimination.
Remote work intensified what researchers called “identity blur” or the breakdown of boundaries between personal and professional life. Not to mention that an entire generation of early-career professionals were doing their identity formation almost exclusively through the professional lens.
Why Tech Communities Exploded
This identity shift created fertile ground for professional communities to thrive in unprecedented ways.
Developer communities, in particular, saw explosive growth. The community infrastructure was already there: Slack, Discord, forums, virtual meetups. But suddenly, these weren’t just places to ask technical questions or network for jobs. They became primary social spaces.
When I started Virtual Coffee in March of 2020, I was desperately looking for people after I lost my first developer job. It wasn’t supplementing my social life because it was my social life. The Tuesday meetups became my weekly social anchor.
And I wasn’t alone. Across the tech ecosystem, professional communities became all-purpose gathering spaces. The hallway track at conferences had always been valuable, but now people were craving the hallway track without the conference. They wanted the coffee shop where everyone was a developer. They wanted to belong somewhere, and professional identity was one of the few identities still accessible.
The Numbers That Told a Story
By 2021, the indicators were everywhere:
- Community engagement increased
- Community programs saw increased recognition of their value
- Having an online community became more important in 2020
- Time on social and community platforms jumped dramatically
But here’s what the numbers weren’t saying: they weren’t showing that people had discovered a permanent need for professional community. They were showing that professional community was filling a vacuum left by every other kind of community disappearing.
Professional community wasn’t competing with other professional communities. It was competing with—and replacing—gyms, coffee shops, happy hours, hobby groups, neighborhood connections, and casual friendships.
The Company Gold Rush
Companies looked at those engagement numbers and saw opportunity.
If you were a tech company in 2020-2021 watching developers flock to online communities, the conclusion seemed obvious: we need a community. If you were hiring and saw that developer engagement was at all-time highs, you might think: we need a community manager. I became a technical community manager because tech was primed to invest in community roles.
The role that was previously a nice-to-have became a strategic imperative.
Companies launched Slacks, Discord servers, forums, and user groups. They hired community managers, developer advocates, and DevRel teams. They built content strategies around community engagement. They measured success by the metrics they were seeing everywhere: member counts, daily active users, message volume.
The logic seemed on track:
- People are engaging with online communities at unprecedented levels
- Our competitors are building communities
- Community drives product adoption and loyalty
- Therefore, we need to invest in community
But this logic missed context.
The Substitution Effect Nobody Acknowledged
What companies were observing wasn’t a permanent shift in how people want to engage with brands or products. It was a temporary substitution driven by extraordinary circumstances.
In 2020-2021, professional communities were standing in for:
- Local social connections (because we couldn’t gather)
- Recreational identities (because hobbies were paused)
- Casual professional networking (because conferences were canceled)
- Workspace camaraderie (because offices were closed)
- General human connection (because isolation was mandatory)
The engagement wasn’t high because people suddenly valued brand communities more. It was high because professional community was the only community many people had access to.
Think about it this way: if you’re working from home, can’t go to the gym, can’t meet friends for coffee, and can’t attend local meetups, where do you find people? If your identity as a weight lifter is on hold because gyms are closed, and your identity as a parent is strained because you’re homeschooling, what’s left? Your professional identity. And where do professionals gather? Online, in communities organized around their work.
What Success Really Looked Like
Companies celebrated metrics that looked like success:
“Our Discord hit 10,000 members!” “Daily active users up 300%!” “Community engagement is our highest ever!”
But a lot of them were ignoring the fact that people weren’t necessarily there because your product was so compelling that they wanted to be part of your brand community. They were there because they were lonely, isolated, and craving connection, and your professional community was one of the only options available.
This isn’t to diminish the genuine connections people made or the real value these communities provided. Virtual Coffee meant–and still means–the world to me. The developer communities that emerged during this time saved people’s mental health and careers.
But the reason for that value was specific to the moment. We were all in crisis, and professional community became a lifeline not because it was uniquely better than before, but because everything else was gone.
Belonging Doesn’t Scale the Way Companies Hoped
But you can’t manufacture the conditions that created pandemic-era engagement.
You can’t make someone lonely enough to spend three hours a day in your Discord.
You can’t make someone isolated enough to treat your Slack like their primary social group.
You can’t make someone identity-starved enough to build their sense of self around your brand community.
And you most definitely should not want to.
As the world reopened, people’s identities re-diversified. The parent identity came back with in-person school. The athlete identity returned with reopened gyms. The friend identity flourished with in-person coffee dates. The hobbyist identity resumed with craft groups and sports leagues.
Professional identity didn’t disappear, but it was one of many identities, not the primary or only identity.
But companies didn’t anticipate: people wanted to keep both.
The connections made during the pandemic weren’t casual networking. They were trauma bonds. We didn’t just share technical knowledge in those slacks and Zoom rooms. We survived isolation together, processed fear together, figured out how to keep going together. We saw each other at our worst: unmuted kids screaming, laundry piles stacked and thrown across the floor, tears with lost jobs. We celebrated new babies through screens. We mourned miscarriages together in the #heavy channel. We watched marriages fall apart in real-time as people processed isolation and stress.
And we lost people.
And when that happened, we couldn’t gather. We couldn’t hug each other. We couldn’t sit together at a funeral. We watched memorial services on Zoom, crying alone in our homes, typing condolences in chat windows, wishing desperately we could just be there together in person.
The grief was compounded by the medium. These were people who’d kept us sane, who we’d talked to nearly every day, who felt like lifelines. And when they were gone, we had to process that loss the same way we’d built the relationship, through screens, at a distance, without the physical comfort that humans need in grief.
These weren’t casual professional connections. These were people who’d seen us completely, who’d held space for our fear and loneliness, who’d shared their own vulnerability in ways that rarely happen in professional contexts. The bonds formed under those conditions of shared trauma, radical vulnerability, mutual survival, don’t just dissolve when offices reopen.
This wasn’t like moving to a new city and losing touch with old friends, or kids graduating so you stop seeing other parents at pickup. Those transitions are natural drift. This was different. People wanted to maintain these deep connections while returning to physical community.
But time is finite. You can’t spend three hours a day in the Virtual Coffee co-working room when you’re back at an actual office. You can’t attend every virtual event when you’re back at the gym, at your kid’s school, at in-person meetups.
The decline in engagement wasn’t people abandoning communities they didn’t care about. It was people being pulled between communities they cared about deeply and being forced to choose.
Some people stayed in their pandemic communities because those bonds meant everything. Some drifted away despite wanting to stay connected. Many tried to maintain both and felt guilty about not being as present online.
Professional identity didn’t disappear, but it returned to being one of many identities, not the primary or only identity. And with finite time and attention, something had to give.
The Misread That Shaped a Strategy
Companies saw the engagement decline and treated it like a problem to solve rather than a natural consequence of changed circumstances. The mistake wasn’t that companies built communities. Many of those communities genuinely serve people who need them, and many of those pandemic-era bonds are real and lasting.
The mistake was thinking they could recreate or sustain trauma-bond-level engagement without the trauma.
They thought the pandemic-era engagement levels were:
- Sustainable (Actually, many required conditions no one should want to recreate)
- Universal (Actually, many were born of collective crisis)
- Reproducible (Actually, many were trauma bonds form under specific circumstances)
- Transferable (Actually, you can’t manufacture that depth of connection on command)
Companies built community strategies around peak crisis participation and crisis-level bonding. They staffed for engagement that made sense when professional community was substituting for all community and people were processing collective trauma together. They created expectations for involvement that assumed people’s entire social lives would continue to flow through professional channels with that same intensity.
When engagement inevitably declined, it wasn’t because the communities failed. People’s lives and needs changed, and then companies panicked. They hired more community managers. They added more features. They pushed harder for participation.
But you can’t solve for the absence of shared crisis with better Slack integrations.
And with that shift, professional communities changed in character, not just size.
Many became transactional. People drop in, ask a question, get an answer, leave. They need the resource, the collective knowledge, the troubleshooting help, the documentation links. But they don’t want or need the connection. They’re not looking for the coffee shop vibe anymore. They’re looking for Stack Overflow with a pulse.
This isn’t everyone. Remote workers still exist. Niche specialists still need their people. Global collaborators still benefit from async communication across time zones. People for whom online professional community isn’t a substitute for anything, because it’s genuinely where their professional community exists.
But even within those groups, the engagement looks different. It’s purposeful, not ambient. It’s “I’m here when I need something” rather than “this is where I hang out.”
And then there are the community builders caught in the middle, trying to recreate that pandemic-era connection and intimacy in product-focused communities where most people just want help with their API integration. They’re hosting office hours that get three attendees. They’re planning social events that get polite “maybe” responses. They’re fighting to build connection in spaces where the majority of members are perfectly content with drive-by interactions.
It’s not that these community builders are doing it wrong. They’re trying to create depth in spaces where most people want efficiency. They’re optimizing for belonging when most users are optimizing for answers.
The communities that thrived on trauma bonds and shared vulnerability can’t be replicated in a product community where people just need their build to work. And expecting them to is setting community builders up to burn out trying to recreate something that only existed under very specific, unrepeatable conditions.
What job is this community actually doing?
In 2020-2021, professional communities were doing the job of: general social connection, professional development, casual friendship, identity formation, and mental health support.
In 2025, they should be doing the job of: professional knowledge sharing, specific technical support, collaboration, and professional networking.
Those are different jobs requiring different strategies, different staffing, and different success metrics.
Communities that thrive post-pandemic aren’t trying to be everything to everyone. They’re specific about who they serve and why. They’re intentional about the value they provide. They recognize that lower engagement isn’t failure. It’s actually right-sizing.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Not every company needs a community.
Even if you needed one in 2020, you might not need one now.
Even if your competitors have one, that doesn’t mean you should too.
Even if engagement was high during the pandemic, that doesn’t mean it should be high now.
The companies that will succeed with community in 2025 and beyond are the ones willing to ask: “Is this actually serving a real need, or are we chasing ghosts of pandemic-era metrics?”
Because belonging doesn’t scale the way we hoped. Identity doesn’t consolidate because we want it to. And crisis-driven engagement isn’t a sustainable business strategy.
This is the second in a series exploring how our understanding of community has changed from 2020 to 2025. Next: How AI and changing expectations are breaking the communities that remain.