Over the years, I've had a lot of time for Matt Colvillle of MCDM. I first came to his youtube channel for thoughts about DM'ing, as I was about to embark on my second (much more successful) stint of DM'ing.
The games that he's put out I think are good. I've back a couple of his kickstarters and used a few things from the books, but have never actually launched into an actual game. Mostly I think, because the mental space that I, and the group that I play with for picking up new rule sets is limited.
I've not watched many of his things for quite some time. The videos are excellent, but long. Lack of mental space etc ...
He's just posted one about community. There's a (slight) focus on how aspects of community intermingle with creating things, and how that bleeds into the fuzzy border between community members and customers. Which is not to say that the words on community are worth less because of that.
He got a fairly excellent definition of community though. To paraphrase, they are the people who are there, who like the things you (or the community) are doing and are capable of regulating their behaviour.
He's quite big on the idea of moderation - people who are asking questions about how to do something, yeah, likely a community member. People telling you what to do, telling you what to do, to change what you're doing, or telling you why the thing you like is wrong, those people are far more likely to not be community members.
There is a drawing of attention to the overlap and distinction between community and customers - there is likely an overlap - many community members will be customers, but it's not a 1-1 mapping. Becoming a customer doesn't make you a community member.
The bit that he's saying out loud though, that feels like it's almost always missed in conversations about community is the exclusion. If people don't like what you're doing, they don't have to be there. Spending more time responding to non-community members is of little to no benefit.
And for me - the inability to regulate ones own behaviour is the tell. If the focus of the community is not to the liking, they don't have be there. If they stick around, and cause trouble - that's an inability to self-regulate behaviour.
I like it, as a structured descriptive framing.