“There’s No Place Like Home”: Online Community Displacement and Migration

Research on online communities (OCs) has focused on why people participate in OCs and less on how they cope and respond when those communities are disrupted or displaced. We undertake a grounded theory analysis of the closure of a 16-year-old firm-sponsored message board to investigate how OCs respond to displacement, how they migrate, and how they make sense of alternative virtual settlements. Our results indicate emotional reactions, contestations, forms of resistance, and symbolic action when OCs are disrupted. Rather than self-organize and reform, the OC we studied became fragmented and followed multiple trajectories. This was not only due to the contested value of the community and the lack of grounding in a firm website, but also because the alternative virtual settlements were inconsistent with the OCs experience of community size, content and conversation, and platform form and function. In considering this case, we provide several contributions to the literature.