alt Hacker NewsThere may be a single feed, but it’s definitely a bunch of “disconnected communities”. That’s why half the people think HN is pro-AI and the other half thinks it’s anti-AI. Everyone gets the same feed but interact with different content on that feed and come to completely different conclusions.
Those are different individual values, not different communities. All of the conversation is co-mingled in the same threads that everyone sees. Everyone is expected to follow HN rules. 1 person can be a part of multiple communities.
An example of different communities would be subreddits. Reddit as a whole connects all of the communities with a front page, but each community is isolated from one another unless you choose to look over or someone else chooses to look into your community. Cross-community conversation happens from the overlap of subreddits followed between individuals.