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One principle that could usefully be built into our networks, which would help foster that sort of community, is reimplementing the functions we're now losing. Just as we lost a lot of functions for a while on PCs when mature DOS programs were translated into immature Windows programs, the conversion of the predominantly text-based Net of the early 1990s into a predominantly graphical environment is costing us features that actually mattered. The WELL's new graphical interface, Engaged, may be easier for newcomers to pick up, but it has yet to install real-time communication (known in WELL lingo as "sends") and the facility for seeing who reads a conference and when they were last there. More real-time features have been lost with an early 1997 decision to change the WELL's mail system in a way that makes it less immediately responsive.

On the Net at large, the now widespread use of graphical software and a desire to minimize the information about systems' users available to hackers have made it less likely that you can look up a user (via the Finger utility) and see if he or she is currently online. (One good feature about America Online is that it not only makes this easy, it gives you an automated routine to do it with.) There is a loss of privacy implicit in this; a reasonable tradeoff might be reciprocity, so that if someone looks up information about you, you can find out they've done it. (This is possible on older UNIX systems and is a basic principle implemented in a futuristic system of badges developed at Britain's Olivetti Research Labs, which register the staff's whereabouts and make the information available over the Internet.) Such a set-up would have the advantage of warning you if someone were obsessively watching you.

The difficulty is that the smaller the community, the more disruptive a misfit can be. One example of this was the well-known 1993 story of a virtual rape on LambdaMOO, the biggest and oldest shared fantasy world. The incident and its consequences (lots of discussion and the eventual elimination of the erring player) led to the formation of a system of government that consists of petitions and ballots whose results are binding on the system administrators, who are bound to carry out whatever the population decides.[7] If a system of social, as opposed to technical, government ever evolves on the wider Net, we will have to find a better way of handling the misfits who inspire its formation.