kagi is explicitly not a community; it's a service you pay for. it's organized around a them/us distinction, and the users are the (atomized) outgroup, individually paying the ingroup for the service provided by that ingroup
there is nothing wrong with that; it's a perfectly good way of organizing things. but it's important not to confuse it with the relationship between, for example, linux users, any of whom is free at any moment to improve the kernel for everyone
I think you misinterpreted what I was saying. Kagi is indeed a paid service and not a community. I was saying it has a way to find small web type sites, but lamenting the fact that part of what made those sites so useful in the past was a tiny community, is gone, and probably not coming back.
That's exactly why it should be a community. Being willing to pay a monthly fee for a search engine sets a higher bar for affluence and caring about the web. So I wish they would do something like create a "Kagi Web" search engine that just consists of their websites, since I'm sure Kagi users have interesting things to say.
Here is the corresponding search engine for that: https://wiby.me