Howard Rheingold - The virtual Community

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

From the Wikipedia:

The Virtual Community is a 1993 book about virtual communities by Howard Rheingold, a member of the early network system The WELL. A second edition, with a new concluding chapter, was published in 2000 by MIT Press.

The book's discussion ranges from Rheingold's adventures on The WELL, computer-mediated communication and social groups and information science. Technologies cited include Usenet, MUDs (multi-user dungeons) and their derivatives MUSHes and MOOs, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), chat rooms, and electronic mailing lists. Rheingold also points out the potential benefits for personal psychological well-being, as well as for society at large, of belonging to a virtual community.

The whole thing(!) is available as hypertext on the authors page. Since some people here are interested in early web communities, maybe it interests you?
https://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

[TheFrugalGamer]

This is very cool! Also, I always love links to free books :)

I will say I couldn't tell at first if it was nonfiction or fiction, so I had to check out its page on Librarything (it's nonfiction, btw). Maybe I'm just being obtuse, but I couldn't tell if he was writing about a real community or an aspirational one, and I haven't started reading it yet.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

You could say it is a broad description/analyses of the existing "virtual society" in the internet from the moment when he wrote it - it might be the single most detailed sociological description of the pre 2000s Internet.