One of the most often employed and least understood notions of modern activist organizations is that of "community". People often talk about it, and act as if they have a clear understanding of what it is. They do not. Not because they don't have any idea of what this community should be, but because they meander between two incompatible ideas and act as if they are the same.
The first idea of "community" is that of a social group, a local, organized community. In this idea, the "community" (be it a LGBT, plural, disabled, BIPOC etc. community of a certain town or neighborhood) is a social group or process of organization, in which people of similar interests and positions find together and create strategic alliances to defend their rights. The important element here is that they are explicit organization; if you're not organized, you don't belong to the community, you merely claim you do. Membership is mediated through these organizations or groups. They don't necessarily need to have formal membership, but it is important that people have personal connection to a place or a network of groups, websites etc. Someone completely unrelated claiming to be part of it is seen as an imposter, trying to "invade" the community. This shows also similarities of this process to the protest against gentrification, the idea that other groups could take on this very concete community and take over their identity (in the way in which gay organizing groups have been captured by financial interest for example). It is therefore clear that this idea of "community" is that of an exclusive, specific group, where one/many is part of because of a certain connection, and for a certain purpose, and which creates a certain self-understanding between them. Also, it is accompanied by power relations within that group, described by such terms as "community leader" or "elder", that are those that ultimately can decide who belongs in it or not, and who represent this group externally. These "leaders" can be elected or inherited positions, the function is the same.
On the other hand, there is a use of "community" that takes it to mean the same as "identity". Here, the community is not this or that social group, but a social category of people, regardless if they have any connection to each other at all. "The LGBT community" is used here as a shorthand for "LGBT people"; it simply means anyone who is part of that identity group. "Belonging" then means nothing but "having this identity", not "being in a group" (i.e. the social relation of acceptance to a certain group of people); in fact, you "belong" to this "community" even if you are reviled by it. And the way you enter is not initiation, but self-identification. While you can't self-identify as being part of a trans writing group in Warsaw for example, since you would actually have to belong to that group to be able to say that and not lie, you can simply identify as being trans; and by that, you are part of "the trans community". This notion of "community" is therefore without authority or leadership that decides who belongs; it simply includes everyone who wants. And being in it is not a personal relation, it is a property (quality, accidens). It is something categorically different from being a part of a group. About this property, we can then make investigations, and here we find out things like if the exact demarkations of that property are results more of convention redistributed through socialization (commonly called "social construction") rather than scientific, and that therefore this idea of self-identification in fact is enought to establish membership. There are also people who protest this, and claim that the property should only belong to certain people who claim it; and therefore, this "community" really is different for anyone who is part of it, or not part of it, since from a position of claiming or not claiming that property alike one/many can have any numbers of ideas on how to define it.
It is pretty obvious that these two things are not the same, cannot be the same. Nonetheless, most people act as if they are. This has a number of reasons:
a) The concrete "communities" define themselves in relation to an abstract "community". Therefore, it is not difficult to misunderstand the second definition as a collection of communities in the first sense. But that is not the case. Being in "the trans community" does not involve being accepted in any trans group, the same way say being in the EU requires to be in a EU country. You simply are trans or not, regardless if you are accepted anywhere, or even out to anyone. But in the other direction, in order to be a member of one of the "communities", you usually are required to have the property - but not because of the structure of the community, but by the discretion of the "community leaders"! They ask for "representation" of the "community" in the second sense and act as if the first type of community would represent it; and to make that illusion plausible, it has to look like a representative organization of everyone of that identity group, even if it is just a social club that appointed itself that position. But because of this dynamic, it _seems_ as if the local LGBT chapter _is_ the local "community" in the second sense, that is, that it's "leaders" are representative for them, even if most LGBT people don't even know them and definitely didn't elect them.
b) "The community" in the second sense can also appear as a social group. Even if there is no membership like in church or state, one can appear to the learned fact that most identities stem from groups that are constituted by concrete membership - be it nationality, religion, political affiliation, company or education. That identities like "being gay" are fundamentally different from that, that they are qualities and not relations to groups, is not obvious when in a specific society all people with that quality are treated as if they were members of a group. The famous example is that of "all black people knowing each other", which is famously nonsense; but people really act as if gay people are friends with other gay people, that they create some kind of "woke" conspiracy (much like antisemitic and islamophobic cliches), so they think people of that identity are a group. And in response to that, a lot of people who "belong to the community" in the second sense really join "communities" in the first sense to fight together, and that it seems to them (as explained in a)), that this group really represents all people of that identity, even if it might, unbeknownst to them, exclude certain people of that identity from it, and decides "who belongs to the community", which is taken by confusion between the two meanings to mean, that those of the identity "belong to", should be in the group, and that only those in the group really "belong", are part of this identity.
c) An important exaggerating factor here are social media platforms, because they _factually_ create groups by identities under things like hashtag categories or search topics. Otherwise unrelated people, just by posting their material on the same platform with the same topic, get related to each other, and so a "community" in the first sense can be created from a "community" in the second, say the "twitter trans community". However, the relation and community here stems from the platform, not the identity. The identity is merely used as a search label, not even as such as thing as a complicated subjective feeling/idea of identification; rather, the label is used in order to "belong" to this group of people who occupy the label. Because this is actually a community in the first sense, we need to think who the "community leaders" are, and the answer is not difficult to find: it's whoever owns the platform and writes the algorithm. I'm sorry to say, but the "leader" of the "trans twitter community" is in fact Elon Musk, as absurd as that sounds; he can decide who "belongs" to #trans.
Many of the strange effects of the last few decades surrounding the questions of minority rights - be it that of "policing identity", of acting as if an org represents whole identities and can decide who should have them, to the idea of "identity politics", that positions abstract qualities as the defining questions of defending specific social groups in cities and rural areas, rather than their interests and empirical desires, and yet claims to "speak" for exactly those people, in the name of their identity - are the result of the confusion of these two ideas of "community". But if we think about it clearly, they cannot be the same. I can't belong to an idea, and I can't declare myself member of a group.
By calling them what they are - group or identity - we get rid of that ambiguity, and could stop using the word "community" for them, instead freeing it for the purpose it actually has, and that it should serve: that virtue of commonality for a group or an idea, that does not constitute a group or that I could call myself part of, but that can be between people when they hapen to act together for a cause they deem just; a sense of "community" not by leaders, definitions or hashtags, but by understanding, a pure luck of understanding and happenstance of even in realizing the absolut difference of mine and anothers consciousness, to still understand, and be it in the fact that I don't understand the other, our common fate; that I understand the other in understanding, that my ignorance of them is part of their ignorance of themselves, as the common light in the shadow of communication. ("Trans community" then as the specific quality of connection in T4T relationships and friendships, for example - where even if you don't really fully get the other's perspective, there is a certain common understanding in alienation.)
And I do think having a word, an understanding of that quality would be important. So please, can we stop calling identities and groups "community"? It actually prevents people to see that their twitter feeds aren't activist groups, and that we can't be freed by labels. "Community" as a sense of connection begins by realizing that difference, by understanding how much of our understanding of who we are is the understanding of how little we understand (ourselves) by the use of names; that we don't belong to identities.