Good afternoon. 

I think most people don't have the ability and purpose to do their Facebook with a huge amount of social features where they have a friend system and stuff. These are actually very large projects that are redundant at the very beginning of a small community. A large number of features and stuff will drive away new users to your community when there are not tens of thousands of people on it, but just a few dozen. This template should be simpler visually and socially. Activity feed on the homepage, interest groups for users, event feed with all comments of users in publications. As a good example of this kind of community I suggest the following: "new .dtf .ru"

No friend system. The whole emphasis of the community is not on the authors, but on the content that these authors create. It is possible to subscribe to users to follow their content.

Less of a social function and more of a focus on the content being created.