It's hard to see a similar thing becoming a more "general" community - reputation is a strongly guarded thing in these tighter-knit communities (woe betide you if you rip someone off on a pattern or steal money/etc. from other knitters, or don't come through on a swap).
Also it's a great way to get involved in the indie craft scene. Crafting materials can be hard to acquire, especially good quality and variety of fibres and yarns, so it's great to be able to go to the source of indie dyers and spinners to get hand-made and custom work done. I know of several indie dyers who would not exist if it hadn't been for Ravelry. Anyone can have an immediate audience for their related goods and services, and there is a great appreciation for quality work (whether it is dying, spinning, or pattern-designing). This sort of immediately accessible feedback is really good for community building.
I don't think it'd be a good idea for all communities to copy Ravelry piece for piece, since it's such a contextual site, but you can certainly think of Ravelry as a case study for an excellent design and response to user needs.
- On Rav anyone can create a new discussion forum, and the creators are responsible for moderating it. It allows the community to continue to grow and embrace a wider range of people who could not otherwise coexist.
- Rav has a like button for ages. It also have agree, love, and disagree, IIRC. Disagree might be mistake. It generates quite a bit of heat. If you've ever had your HN posts downvoted without comment you'll know how annoying it is.
It's worth signing up even if you don't knit just to check out the tech.
I have to say I really appreciate Ravelry having so many options for voting. I used to post a lot in one of the tech forums on Ravelry, especially in reply to one person that kept posting information that was secondhand and wildly inaccurate. Unfortunately, she would have her own groupies (for lack of a better term) that would vote her comment as educational/agree/love. I would also have people that backed me up in the same way. If you didn't have any disagrees (for which I had far less than she did) you wouldn't be able to easily tell who to listen to. Nor is a straightforward up/down type voting system the best in a discussion.
I think that system is fabulous especially for forums and discussion mediums (see also: slashdot). Not so much for something like reddit or twitter where only one or two options is probably the only sane option to provide for many reasons.
also of interest, the tech behind the site: http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2010/03/24/ravelry-runs-on-201...
While Facebook may have areas in which digital communities form, it is a constructed primarily to facilitate and track communications between people with existing real world relationships - for users it is ateleological. On the other hand, Ravelry has a sense of purpose - better knitting - which creates an overall community.
People on sites like Ravelry interact extensively and willingly with people they only know and often meet online because they are members of the same digital community. This is generally not the case with Facebook et al. where interactions are largely between people who have met face to face at some point. This means that Ravelry's social graph is constructed digitally on the site - unlike Facebook, for online communities where one went to junior high school is far more difficult to determine and there's no reason for your mom to join unless she is interested in knitting.
The title isn't misleading to me.
I found this really interesting since StackExchange took the opposite view and raised a ton of cash. OK, it's not quite a social network but they did take something that was wildly successful in one domain (Q&A for programmers) and try to apply the format to other areas. I'm inclined to think that Ravelry's approach could be applied to other areas (e.g cooking) but it's their choice.
I think it's good that there are some successful people out there who are questioning the dogma that ambition is the superlative human trait, that it is somehow wrong to not grow everything as much as possible, or that this should be an end in itself. Good luck to them.
Part of the problem, I think, is that some topics are just much more suited to objective questions and answers than others. In programming, math, system administration, and so on, there are enough objectively right or wrong answers to keep subjective discussion from overwhelming the site. In other topics, what people really want is subjective discussion, polls, and so on, which just don't fit the Stack Exchange model well.
I wouldn't quite say that Stack Exchange has been successful in its expansion. It's had a few successes in other domains, and limited success in a few more, but there are a lot of communities that are really struggling to find their footing.
If you're going into a market with no existing
competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better
use the Amazon model, or you're going the way of
Wordsworth.com, which started two years before Amazon,
and nobody's ever heard of them. Or even worse, you're
going to be a ghost site like MSN Auctions with
virtually no chance of ever overcoming ebay.
They raised $70,000 dollars in DONATIONS from their members in order to do some growth back them. That's insane.
They actually hauled an antique spinning wheel across the country for her, made us some italian chicken, and regaled us with tales of revolutionary war re-enactment over dinner. utterly fascinating folk, generous and warm and welcoming. my girlfriend is now building a business around yarn, knitting and spinning, and ravelry is, and will be, instrumental to her growth.
it's one of the most impressive community/social network projects i've EVER seen.
I used to feel that Facebook was just as necessary as Ravelry is to me (I am a knitter) until they started adding so much extra cruft and decided I want to read things like friends' comments on posts written by people I don't even know. So much extraneous information forced into my news feed and into the site in general made me stop using it as often. That doesn't even begin to address how anemic friends lists and such are for addressing how people really interact with the people they know.
In that way I'm really loving what I've experienced of Google+ so far. The idea of communicating in circles is so thoroughly baked into the product that it feels effortless to share one thing with, say, my coder friends, and something totally different to my family, without the other group needing to see that stuff.