During the pandemic, I occupied the same space—a Zoom room-with members of the Virtual Coffee community from all over the world. We’ve had members across the US, Canada, South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. We saw each other whether in an official Virtual Coffee even or in our virtual co-working room that stayed open 24/7. Sometimes we’d chat. Sometimes in co-working, we’d just… exist together. The way you might nod at a regular at your local coffee shop, or exchange pleasantries with someone you see at the gym every Tuesday.

It was the digital equivalent of running into someone in the dairy aisle, except the dairy aisle was a Zoom room, and the “someone” could be in Jakarta, São Paulo, Manchester, or Kansas City.

For a brief window in modern history, “local” stopped meaning geography and started meaning something else entirely.

The Collapse of Default Community

Before March 2020, most of us didn’t have to think much about what “community” meant. It was simply the people you saw regularly: coworkers, neighbors, your kid’s soccer team parents, the familiar faces at church or the gym. Community was embedded in the infrastructure of daily life and was predictable, physical, and largely determined by proximity.

Then proximity disappeared.

When lockdowns began, the familiar networks evaporated overnight. The parents I’d chat with at pickup. The coworkers I’d decompress with after meetings. Gone overnight. For many people, even family members suddenly became “distant” in the truest sense of the word.

The impact was immediate and profound. Two-thirds of adults reported experiencing social isolation during the pandemic, with more than half of adults 50 and older reporting an absence of meaningful social relationships. For younger adults, the statistics were even more stark: 61% of young adults felt “serious loneliness” during this period, and 43% reported increases in loneliness since the pandemic’s outbreak.

We didn’t lose our desire for community. We lost the infrastructure that had been quietly supporting it all along.

The Great Virtualization

What happened next wasn’t entirely new. People had been building online communities for years. But the scale and speed were unprecedented. Suddenly, everyone needed to figure out how to find belonging through a screen. When the physical infrastructure disappeared, we rebuilt it digitally.

From massive pandemic hackathons to new Slack and Discord communities, people everywhere began re-creating local belonging at scale.

I started Virtual Coffee with weekly Tuesday meetings that were regular, predictable, and rhythmic. In a lot of ways, therapeutic. Then, the co-working room that transformed it into something that felt genuinely “local.” That room was open all the time. You could drop in whenever. You’d see who else was around. Sometimes you’d end up in a spontaneous conversation about your project, or someone’s career transition, or absolutely nothing at all. We added a virtual book club, CodeWars challenges, and another day of coffee chats. Interintellect salons hosted three-hour events where people from diverse backgrounds came together for intellectually stimulating conversation, bridging tech and non-tech interests through Discord.

The magic was in the serendipity. The unplanned encounters. The way you’d sign on to get work done and end up chatting with someone from South Africa about their startup idea, or find yourself in a breakout room with a developer from Russia who was working through the same frustrating bug you’d just solved. We were strangers from different continents creating something that felt remarkably like what a neighborhood coffee shop might have provided. Except our “neighborhood” spanned time zones, and our “coffee shop” never closed.

What Made It Work

Looking back, I think the pandemic-era virtual communities that thrived shared a few key characteristics:

• Regularity without rigidity. You knew when things were happening, but you didn’t need an invitation to show up. The co-working room was always there. The Tuesday meetings happened every Tuesday. This created rhythm, a temporal equivalent of “I know I’ll see you at the grocery store on Saturday mornings.”
• Space for the unplanned. I still believe that the most meaningful connections don’t happen during structured programming. They happened in the margins: before the official meeting start, in the co-working room at odd hours, in side channels where someone posted a random question and three people end up in a deep conversation.
• Low barriers. high humanity. The fact that events moved online opened communities up to people who might have been too uncomfortable to attend an in-person event due to anxiety, financial constraints, or something else, allowing for realtime conversations over Slack or Discord instead of struggling with in-person social time. Nobody cared about ring lights or professional setups. We showed up in our kitchens, with kids screaming in the background, with laundry visible behind us. The bar for participation was simply: be present, be kind, be human.
• Shared vulnerability. We were all figuring it out together. Nobody had their shit completely sorted. That leveled the playing field in a way that’s rare in professional communities. In other words, the senior engineer and the bootcamp student/grad (ie, me) were equally disoriented by the moment we were living through.

The Shift Back

Then, gradually, the physical world opened back up.

By February 2023, reports of loneliness had declined from the March 2021 peak of 25% to 17%, coinciding with the COVID-19 vaccine era and the broad reopening of everyday life. People returned to offices, or to coffee shops, gyms, schools, or co-working spaces again. The default infrastructure of community came back in-person.

And the international local communities… shifted.

The co-working room got quieter. The Tuesday meetings still happened, but attendance thinned. Not because people stopped caring, but because they could now get some of those needs met in physical space again. Time—everyone’s most finite resource—got redistributed back to the in-person world.

Before the pandemic, people spent the bulk of their social time at work, and remote work led to loneliness and feeling disconnected. The shared physical space offered opportunities to network, mentor others, and build community that were hard to recreate in a scattered, virtual workforce.

This wasn’t a failure. It was just the natural consequence of changed circumstances.

But it left a lot of questions unanswered.

Where We Are Now

We’re in a strange liminal space. Virtual communities haven’t disappeared, but they’re not serving the same function they did in 2020-2022. The urgency is gone. 74% of community programs reported increased recognition of their value during the pandemic, but that recognition was tied to a specific moment in time—a moment that has passed.

People are negotiating between physical and digital belonging in ways we haven’t fully figured out yet.

And meanwhile, companies are asking: “Why isn’t our community as engaged as it was during the pandemic?”

But that’s the wrong question.

The right question is: “Who actually needs this community now, and what are we building it for?”

During the pandemic, virtual communities weren’t just filling a professional need. They were filling all our social needs. Professional community became a substitute for general community because it was all we had. The developer slack was my coffee shop, my gym, my after-work happy hour, my weekend hangout.

Now that general social needs can be met locally again for many people, the population who needs online-as-local has shifted back to who it always was:

• Fully remote workers who’ve left physical proximity to colleagues behind entirely
• Developers who want casual peer conversation without the overhead of professional networking events
• People who want the hallway track experience (those serendipitous conversations that happen between sessions)
• Specialists in niche areas where their “local” doesn’t have anyone else working on their specific stack or problem domain
• Disabled folks, caretakers, and others for whom physical gatherings have always been inaccessible
• Global collaborators building projects across continents and time zones
• People who want the coffee shop, but the coffee shop is all developers

These communities still matter deeply. They’re still someone’s local. The mistake isn’t that these communities exist—it’s that companies think everyone needs this, all the time.

The coffee shop didn’t disappear; it just got quieter.

Redefining Local, Again

The always-on, drop-in, developer coffee shop model didn’t stop working. It just stopped being universal.

In 2020-2021, everyone needed it because everyone was isolated. In 2025, it serves a specific population: people whose physical environment doesn’t provide the technical community they need. This isn’t new. This population always existed. The pandemic just temporarily made everyone part of it.

The confusion comes from companies who saw engagement numbers during lockdown and thought, “This is what community looks like now.” They built strategies around peak-crisis participation and are now wondering why engagement dropped when the crisis ended.

But for the people who are fully remote, who do work in niche areas, who actually need virtual-as-local? The future of virtual community isn’t choosing between “always-on” and “seasonal engagement.” It’s recognizing that different models serve different needs:

• Always-on spaces for people who need virtual-as-local (remote workers, niche specialists, global teams)
• Event-driven communities for people who have local networks but want to expand them occasionally
• Project-based cohorts for people collaborating on specific initiatives
• Hybrid models that acknowledge some members need daily presence while others drop in monthly

The question isn’t “Do we still need the 24/7 co-working room model?” The question is: “Who are we actually serving, and what do they need?”

The brief era when local went global taught us something important about what community actually requires. Not geography. Not even, proximity.

Rhythm, serendipity, and the willingness to show up wherever you are and be human together.

Those needs haven’t disappeared. But the population experiencing them has returned to its pre-pandemic size—still significant, still vital, just less universal.

The question now is: can we build sustainable models for the people who actually need virtual-as-local, without expecting everyone to need it all the time?

This is the first in a series exploring how our understanding of community has changed from 2020 to 2025. Next: Why companies misread the moment and built communities for everyone when they should have built for someone. When the world redefined community, companies thought they could scale it. But belonging doesn’t scale, at least, not the way they hoped.