I've been watching the community world for over 20 years, and somewhere along the way a strange idea took hold.
Communities, apparently, should be hidden. Locked behind login walls or buried inside closed chat systems where the outside world can't see a thing.
When I say "private," I mean two kinds. The obvious kind sits behind a paywall, a login wall, or an invite-only gate. The second kind looks busy from the inside but invisible from the outside: Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram. Useful conversations happen there, but good luck discovering any of them later unless someone personally drags you in.
I'm talking about creator communities, professional communities, membership communities, B2B SaaS communities. The kind that need growth and discovery to compound. Support groups, internal team spaces, and anything where confidentiality is the whole point are a different conversation.
My argument is narrow: a lot of communities that want growth are hiding too much, too early.
No windows, no signage. If you find one by accident, you knock once, maybe twice, and wait for someone to approve you. What's behind the door is usually thinner than the gatekeeping implies, a dry patch of half-buried threads, short chat messages, and content that disappears five minutes later. There are exceptions, but not many.
So when people ask why community growth feels hard, my first answer is that nobody can see the community.
I understand the instinct. You want to protect the culture, cut down on spam, and keep the space from filling with drive-by noise off the internet. Fair enough.
But those aren't the first problems to solve. Before you can protect a culture, you need enough people to make one, and enough of the right people in the room to make it worth protecting.
The community industry obsesses over engagement after the join and barely thinks about discovery before it. That's the mistake.
Some community builders treat the login wall as part of the product, as if hiding content makes the place feel premium. It doesn't. It makes it harder to trust.
"Join first and find out" is not a serious growth strategy. Maybe it works if you're Taylor Swift, but it does not work for the rest of us.
Before anyone joins, they want to know what's in it for them. If the answer is "create an account and we'll show you," most of them will leave.
A landing page is what you say about yourself. A public discussion is what everyone else can see about you. The second one is evidence, and people want evidence before they commit.
When the best parts of your community live inside Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, or Telegram, future members can't find that value, search it, forward it to a colleague, or judge whether it's worth their time.
The result is that you end up having to convince each new member by hand, one at a time.
Outreach, personal invites, and hand-holding your first 50 members are all fine. But if every signup after that still depends on a one-on-one conversation, you've built a recurring labor cost rather than a growth engine.
Inside, everything looks healthy: active conversations, familiar names, useful exchanges, jokes only the regulars understand. Outside, there's almost nothing to find. No searchable knowledge, no visible proof, no trail leading back to you.
The hosts are throwing a party nobody outside knows about, then wondering why attendance is low.
In 2026, this gets worse. If your community isn't indexable, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the other answer engines have nothing to find, cite, or recommend. You're opting out of a growing referral channel by design.
An answer published openly today can bring the right person into your orbit months later. The same answer buried in a private chat is a missed opportunity.
The community world loves one line of advice: go where your users are. That's one reason Slack and Discord became popular as community homes.
Slack works for teams collaborating in real time, Discord for fast-moving communities where live interaction matters, WhatsApp for close-knit group chat. But none of them are a good long-term knowledge system.
Say you spend an hour writing a thoughtful post for your community and share it in Slack. Two minutes later, someone drops in with, "Hey everyone, quick question..."
That's it. Your post is buried under replies, reactions, screenshots, and unrelated messages about billing, templates, or whether the recording is available. Good luck finding it again next month.
These platforms are built for conversation rather than compounding value. They optimize for energy over memory. A useful piece of community knowledge shouldn't have the lifespan of a fruit fly.
Not everything should be public. Sensitive conversations should stay private: support threads, vulnerable sharing, member-only networking, behind-the-scenes talk about strategy, deals, or things going badly. Some spaces matter more for trust than for reach.
There's also a quality tradeoff worth naming. Public spaces change what people post. When members know strangers are reading and screenshots are easy, they write more carefully. They hold back the half-formed thinking, the messy questions, the stories with a name attached. Some of the best contributions in any community are the ones members would never make on a public stage.
That's a real cost, and a real reason to keep one layer of the community closed.
What I'm against is the lazy default. Too many communities ended up private because it was familiar, convenient, or baked into the tool they happened to pick, and then let that accident shape their entire growth model.
This is why I keep coming back to hybrid communities: partly public, partly private, on purpose.
A rough 80/20 split is a useful starting point. Don't hold me to the exact percentage, I'm not drafting tax law. The direction is what matters. Most of your useful, educational, discovery-friendly content should be readable without a login, and the sensitive, high-trust layer should stay behind one.
The public layer should solve real problems in your niche. It should answer the questions your future members are already typing into Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
That layer attracts people. Most of them will lurk and never join, but a smaller number will sign up. That's how a healthy top of funnel behaves.
Then let the private layer do what private spaces do best: support, context, feedback, member-only interaction, the trust-rich discussion that doesn't belong in public.
Most serious communities need both.
The move toward hybrid can happen in steps.
Start by publishing a weekly public recap of the best community discussions. Clean up the useful parts, remove the private details, turn chat into something durable.
Take the questions that come up again and again and turn them into public FAQs, guides, or short discussion posts. If the same question keeps showing up inside your community, people outside it are asking the same thing.
Make event takeaways public. Share summaries, recordings, clips, transcripts, or written learnings. If a webinar or office hour produced value, don't let that value die in the room.
Create one public surface people can actually find: a forum, a website section, a knowledge hub, even a basic archive of your best discussions. If you're committed to Slack as the interaction layer, pair it with a discoverable public layer instead of expecting Slack to do both jobs. Tools like Tightknit can help bridge Slack with a public-facing layer if you don't want to migrate.
Doing this deliberately matters more than doing it fast.
If you want your community to grow, stop asking people to jump over a wall before they know what's on the other side.
Show them the value first. Let them browse, read, and get a feel for the quality, tone, and usefulness of the space before they decide. Let them feel a little of the good kind of FOMO, the kind that makes someone think: alright, this is actually useful, I should join.
Right now, too many communities do the opposite. They hide everything, show nothing, and act surprised when growth stalls. Unless you're running a secret society or a support group for aliens in Area 51, private-by-default should not be your operating model.
Most communities don't need higher walls. They need more windows.
Kaustubh is the founder of Jatra, a platform that helps businesses build branded communities designed for growth, retention and discoverability.
