One might think people in a large community have a higher chance of making friends; yet people still fall through the cracks. In fact we associated such cracks with large organizations not small. The community may fault such individuals as socially awkward, shy, introverted, or generally having poor social skills. These individuals in turn could fault the community as insular, homogenous, xenophobic, exclusive, ignorant/unenlightened, or generally a poor fit. These may be at play; however social structure offers another factor.
Theory
Social theory observes that people have the capacity to make and maintain around eight quality friendships, more for extroverts, less for introverts. (Is there a name for this general rule?). Upon entry into a new environment, an individual typically fills these eight slots within the first two months. That can explain the relative easy with making friends at the start of a new school term or the founding of a new community. In this early period, people are relationally more open and then more closed as slots are maxed. However, not everyone fills their slots by this two-month deadline and "fall through" can occur. So do communities becoming more exclusive or xenophobic with time? Not necessarily as they may just have maxed their emotional capacity to relate, and thus are structurally less welcoming. Likewise after seeking friends for two months, do individuals simply become exhausted from looking?
Faltering
If nine people each have eight slots for friendship and each person's eight slots are filled exactly by the other eight, there is no room for a 10th addition, especially after two months from the time the 9th person joins. Person #11 would at least have #10, if #10 hadn't already given up on the community. (Are #11 and #10 then casualties of circumstance?) Most communities want to see growth, but numbers are insufficient if they're just accruing dissatisfied constituents. Thus no matter the size of the community there is the risk of faltering growth each time existing members have already maxed their eights.
Questions, Experimentation
How then does a community organize to maintain capacity for meaningful relationships among established members and newcomers? I am not a social scientist, therefore I do not know the work that has been done on this front. I do believe there needs to be an elaboration of this eight-friends theory. Does a person generally establish a set of eight friends for each new community they become a part of? What happens to the relational bonds of person's previous eight when one joins a new community? If people actually establish multiple sets of eights without sacrificing quality, then it stand that a community organizer can periodically shuffle or reshuffle subgroups of people to allow for periodic resets and new eights to be established. This allows people the opportunity to make friends in a smaller group setting (less likely to have cracks); while giving people an out of friends to fall back on in the larger community. Then the next detail is periodicity. How long after a two-month incubation period of slot filling does a relationships become meaningful and of lasting quality. Would reshuffling nullify the relational bonds that were just established? This of course would be a grand experiment requiring a willingness of participants.
