The Future of Communities powered by FluentCommunity
I think the future of online communities sits somewhere between Reddit, Patreon, and Circle.
Reddit is powerful because it gathers people around shared interests at scale — but it often feels too broad, noisy, and spammy to build real depth.
Patreon is great for monetization, but it’s centered around individual creators. It helps people sell content, not really build an open community around a niche or topic.
Circle enables more focused micro-communities, which are valuable — but they can be hard to grow and sustain. Too many small communities around the same topic end up competing for the same people, which fragments attention and limits momentum.
What I believe works best is the middle:
mid-sized to large niche communities built around a topic, not just a single creator, while:
- people gather because they genuinely care about the niche,
- creators can monetize some content, expertise, or access,
- and their contributions also help grow the broader community itself.
That model feels more sustainable:
bigger than a private creator membership, but more focused than a massive open forum.
FluentCommunity has a rare opportunity to power this types of communities thanks to the power of WordPress if it provides more targeted features and more integrations.
As therre are a lot of things that can be done if fluentCommunity team decides to go down this rabbit hole, I have suggested three main things to be considered as a start and a MVP for such a platform. Please vote on the roadmap issues, but provide your thoughts about my concept in a general here.
https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/1186/
https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/1187/
https://community.wpmanageninja.com/fluentcommunity-roadmp/#/idea/1188/
- Reddit is a forum style platform wouldnt call it neither social network nor community.
- The most popular social networks are insta, FB, x, LinkedIn.
- Roadmap for fluent products doesnt exist, nobody knows what theyre doing internally. They dont follow the roadmap, it has 0% affect on fluent products.
- Reply with your ideas please, I'm building addons for fluentcommunity and fluentcart so it it makes sense I will build these.
Cointacter Generally the idea is to move towards marketplace.
- Allow anyone to be able to able to create a space and by setting it may be anyone or specific roles in WP. So FuentCommunity may be sth like Reddit but more advanced in a manner that it may allow certain roles to create a space and not just anyone. on to this would need some more adjustments with per space based roles like admins moderagtors etc. but this can also happen in the future not the first thing to do.
- Create the possibility to integrate with plugins like PMPro and other membership plugins together with marketplace plugins like Dokan and this will allow FluentCommunity to act similarly like Patreon - different creators to have spaces where you can subscribe for some content.
- allow to create events and courses marketplace - similarly to the above.
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These three can set a basis to expand fluent community from the micro-communty thing to a niche community powered by multiple creators and/or experts which can sell content like in patreon or courses or both. But unlike Patreon the idea is that they can do in the context of a bigger niche community. this will allow niche communities to be created and creators or experts to contribute as the main power of developing the community but also being able to monetise their content, courses or expertise (with events and bookings).
I would be happy to discuss with you if you find this direction useful, and going deeper into describing the concept, if you want to develop such plugins.