New communities

Most communities on the canvas existed before it. 627 of the 705 had posts or comments in the week before the canvas opened. The other 78, 11%, have no record in that week: most were founded for the event. They are the clearest case of organizational emergence in the record, because the organization and its artwork begin together.

A caution first. The record has no creation dates, so an older subreddit that was silent that week looks new. A few of the 78 may be such cases.

Three kinds

We sorted the 78 by reading the atlas descriptions, the coded records of the 627 older communities (where a parent sends its canvas work to a new subreddit), and each community's own coded record. Each sort is a reading of short texts; the table behind this page gives the evidence for every community.

Support communities for a parent subreddit (19)

An existing community opened a new subreddit to coordinate its canvas work, or its members did. r/PlaceNL served r/thenetherlands, r/placeDE served r/de and r/germany, r/ukplace served r/unitedkingdom, r/theitalyplace served r/italy, and r/AcePlace served r/asexuality. On r/italy a moderator "moves r/place submissions to r/theitalyplace". The parent keeps its identity; the new subreddit carries the work.

Support communities for a group outside Reddit (13)

A university club, a team or a fandom with no subreddit of its own opened one for the canvas: r/compsoc, r/mcgillrobotics, r/aeskwadraat. All are small, with at most 55 posts and comments while the canvas was open.

Place-only communities (33)

These organized around the canvas itself: a color, a zone, a pattern or a figure born on the canvas, with no prior group behind it. They include the Rainbow Road community, r/thebluecorner and r/orderofthebluecorner, r/theblackvoid, r/greenlattice, r/PurplePixels, r/TeamYellowPlace, r/placestart and r/monalisaclan. The Void and the color corners are identities the canvas made.

Uncertain (13)

Identity artworks with no parent found, or with a mixed origin. r/Goodboye began as a dog from a video game and became a canvas mascot; r/THE_R was "dedicated to protecting the great R".

Small in talk, large on the canvas

New communities wrote less but held more of the canvas. The table gives medians.

Place-only communities hold the largest artworks: a median of 1,742 pixels and 81,070 changes, ten times the older communities. The figures carry two cautions: a shared artwork counts in full for each community it credits, and the atlas records only what survived.

What the population model says

The population model was built before this sort and names the same phenomenon. At stage D3 it holds a candidate element, P28: "A room forms for the canvas around a mark. Members open a sub or a chat for a pattern or a figure and set it up." (In the run's words, a room is a community and a mark an artwork.) Host framing includes members who "open a canvas sub" (P20). Collective identity includes a community acting "as a faith in a colour" (K04), under the fourth-order theme Neo-tribes. The codes agree: professing loyalty to a color appears in 10 of the 78 new communities and in 2 of the 627 older ones.

The forms also separate them. None of the 78 falls in form E, the host subreddit's April Fools play run as work, which holds 98 older communities. A community founded for the canvas had no host to play in.

The aggregator received the week-before table at stage D4 but did not use it to define a form. A later run could make emergence a dimension of its own, test P28 against these 78 communities, and compare support communities with their parents.

Sources

The week-before activity table (activity-week-before.csv, built with the hourly pixel table), the census (MASTER-census.csv), the atlas descriptions, and the run's model (MODEL-D3.md), scheme and form allocation. The classification of all 705, with the evidence for each of the 78, is in new-communities.csv.