Community Fission & Fusion

Theory #4 | Productizing the dynamism of communities.

People talk a lot about building a new community, but rarely about how it evolves.

Communities are fundamentally groups, and groups aren’t static, they’re dynamic — constantly forming, evolving, fragmenting, and even breaking apart into sub-groups or new communities. So products that serve communities should make it easy for this evolution to occur.

Take group chats as a universal example. Someone starts a large Whatsapp group and eventually sub-groups break off unannounced — the original is unaffected, begins to decay, is paused, or dies.

With the right tools, it’s all fairly simple and elegant.

What is a fission-fusion society?

“A fission-fusion society is one in which the size and composition of the social group change as time passes and animals move throughout the environment; animals merge into a group (fusion)—e.g., sleeping in one place—or split (fission)—e.g., foraging in small groups during the day.”¹

Humans form and live in fission-fusion societies. Fission is the action of dividing something into two or more parts. Fusion is the joining of two or more things to create a single entity. When fission or fusion takes place, it can be temporary or permanent.

Change in composition, subgroup size, and dispersion of different groups are three main elements of a fission-fusion society. Composition characterizes people in a group (e.g., homogenous vs. heterogenous), subgroup size describes the number of people (i.e., how large the group is), and dispersion looks at group distribution across space.

The overarching group is often called the parent group. Parent groups can break apart into smaller groups based on environmental or social situations that arise — whether often or just once, temporary or permanent. Distinct parent groups can also encounter each other, co-mingle, and emerge changed.

Fission-fusion societies are defined by a variety of these fission-fusion dynamics, also known as merge and split dynamics. It’s fascinating to think about how these dynamics translate to digital native or hybrid online communities — and how digital tools, products, and platforms can allow fission and fusion to occur.

Where do we see fission & fusion features in social products?

In this ‘very online’ world, we’re constantly creating communities and it’s common for people to belong to many at once. We create spaces and build walls, membranes, and gates to help communities organize and adapt to changing circumstances.

Since fission and fusion, whether temporary or permanent, are natural tendencies of communities, it makes sense that social products should reflect the same. Each combination has a unique use case and can map to unique product features.

1️⃣ Breakouts (Temporary Fission)

Fission is often temporary, where a portion of a group breaks off for a short period of time and later returns to join the parent group. These are breakouts.

Zoom has an explicit breakout rooms feature that lets you split a group into many distinct sessions. Interestingly, the DMs feature of feed-based social platforms can be a private breakouts feature (e.g. Twitter DMs). Comments features (e.g. on YouTube) let a subset of viewers have a public sidebar without really breaking off.

2️⃣ Spinouts (Permanent Fission)

Sometimes fission is a one-way, permanent action. When communities grow, become more heterogenous, or have inner strife, stability can decrease and eventually prompt fission. I think of this as mitosis or spinouts from the parent group.

Slack general channels often get too large for the conversation to remain focused on a narrow set of topics and pertinent to everyone included. When a subset of the group breaks off to start a new, persistent channel, that’s fission.