On HN, we should think about socialism as a startup. Prove it with a small number of loyal customers, listen and learn from them, and then show how it scales to a lot of customers.
It seems to be stuck at the "scale it up" stage. Attempts to scale it up are generally non-voluntary, and have bad outcomes. Even keeping a small group of loyal customers is challenging.
An obscure hippie commune would like to talk to you about an early stage investment opportunity. /s
Seriously though, to your point, existing and historical communes require 100% voluntary buy-in to work. That doesn't scale beyond a couple hundred people. So, as you say, it becomes "non-voluntary" beyond a certain size, which is a nice way of saying it is made possible via force.
We already have all this infrastructure and socially organized modes of production for producing goods and services, it wouldn't make sense not to use them to build a more rational society instead of one based on domination.
I'm not sure how you could argue that building a society in service of profit motives is somehow more rational than building a society for the people living in it.
It seems to be stuck at the "scale it up" stage. Attempts to scale it up are generally non-voluntary, and have bad outcomes. Even keeping a small group of loyal customers is challenging.