If we want to build a tribe, we start by unlearning what modern culture has taught us about groups.
A tribe is not a chat thread, a Facebook group, an audience, a brand, or a collection of people who are into the same weird things. A tribe is a small, closely-connected set of people who become accountable to one another through repeated, shared effort.
Tribes of this kind require a few key ingredients, which can be used as a rough guide to start our own tribes.
First, keep it small. Five to twelve people is the workable range. Fewer than that and the group falls apart under if someone stops showing up or, more commonly, conflict causes irreparable damage. More than that and people start hiding in the crowd. Tribes work because everyone is visible. Eventually, once established, a tribe can grow to about 100-150 people and still function as a tribe, but that's WAAAYYYY too big in the beginning.
Second, the group must already be bonded in some way. You don't start with random strangers sitting in a circle in room and hope connection emerges. There has to be a seed, and that seed can be a shared activity, shared history, shared place, or shared challenge. The bond doesn’t need to be deep yet, but it has to be real.
Third, boundaries matter. A tribe must know who is in and who is out. That doesn't mean exclusion for its own sake, but it means clarity. Without edges, people don’t invest. Open-ended groups drift into either performance or disengagement. Psychologically, the boundary has to invoke the in-group/ out-group bias. That's the measure we can use to decide if our boundaries are defined well enough.
Fourth, in-person contact must be repeated and embodied. This is non-negotiable, and probably the hardest part about forming a tribe in our modern social media-dominated world. Tribes have to be built through regular, in-person contact. And that contact has to involve effort. Working, training, building, cooking, struggling... even suffering... it has to be something that costs energy. Shared effort creates trust faster than conversation ever will.
Fifth, contribution must be visible. Everyone has to matter in a concrete way. Each member should know what they bring to the tribe, and each member should know what others bring to the tribe. When contribution is invisible, resentment grows and belonging becomes symbolic instead of earned.
Sixth, accountability must be relational. Rules alone do not create cohesion. Expectations do. Members need permission to call each other out when standards slip. This is uncomfortable, which is why most groups avoid it... which is also why most groups fail.
Finally, the tribe needs a story. Not a mission statement or some other feel-good bullshit. Your tribe needs an explanation of why this group exists and why showing up matters, based on the real, lived experiences of the tribe members. The story doesn’t need to be grand, but it does need to be true. If people can’t explain why the tribe exists in a sentence or two, the tribe doesn’t exist. Yet.
There's one more thing that's not quite an ingredient, but a consideration. It's the one place where almost all modern pseudo-tribes fail:
A real tribe has to be demanding.
I'm not suggesting the tribe be abusive or rigid, but it does have to be demanding enough that participation costs something. That something could be time, effort, discomfort, responsibility... whatever. If the bar is low, people drift. If nothing is asked, nothing is earned. Tribes form around shared standards, not shared comfort. The friction is not a flaw; it is the mechanism that creates the real connections between the members of the tribe that matter.
If you remove ANY one of these ingredients, you may still have a group, but it will devolve into a club, a support circle, a fandom, or a social outlet. Not a tribe. In that situation, the connections among members is too weak to get the real benefits of a tribe. They're not useless, but they're not the kinds of connections we need to solve the kinds of problems tribes solve.
A tribe is not something you declare. It is something that emerges when these conditions are held long enough for trust, identity, and accountability to form.
This is the starting point.
Now go form your tribe.
~ Jason
