that can only happen in small communities [...]
Dunbar's number perhaps?
There's a quiet and bleak seaside village-y sense of peace here, I find.
I really like this way to put it :p
Solderpunk recently (-ish) described the smolnet (Gemini and Gopher) as partially serving as a retirement community for the Netscape generation, and that kind of resonates for me.
Dunbar's number indeed! Though sadly there's no scientific proof it really exists. It does make intuitive sense to me, and I even wrote a whole manifesto loosely based around it: