

Nobody said anything about serfdom.
Communities shouldn’t be able to fail like so.
Communities are always able to fail like so. A division between members can absolutely fracture any kind of social cooperation.
Your average stand-alone commune doesn’t get that much bigger than a family-farm.
This isn’t a commune, it’s a compound. Or a live/work arrangement. Or just a cult, depending on how “we’re all family here” they are.
I wouldn’t encourage too deep an integration between artisans and single communes. Everyone in the commune should know how to make their commune work and who do go to outside the commune when specific tools or expertise are needed beyond their commune’s residents.
This isn’t a commune, it’s just a town, or a village.
The whole concept of a commune is self-supporting, self-sustaining and to at least some degree self-contained. Also, frequently, self-absorbed.
No one person in a commune should be irreplacable or capable of taking the whole thing down
The smaller the group is the more inevitable this is. At a very small size (less than 20 people), where the group is dependent on itself for food production, then just the loss of basic labor might ruin the group’s ability to provide for itself.
in a way that prevents residents from being able to just up and leave.
If everyone just up and leaves, what was even the point of forming a commune? Again, what you’re talking about is just a town. A primarily agrarian town maybe, but still just a town.
Hmm, but you have to install and run the Python environment for that. AWK is typically present on *NIX systems already. Python seem alike overkill for basic text processing tasks.