Noun
virtual community (plural virtual communities)
A group of people who primarily communicate or interact via the Internet.
Before the Internet, before BBSes and Fidonet and Usenet and LiveJournal and blogs and Facebook and Twitter, before the World Wide Web and hot-and-cold-online-everything, science fiction fandom had a long-lived, robust, well-debugged technology of social networking and virtual community. Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Any virtual community that works, works because people put in some time. Howard Rheingold