Who's getting let in to check for abuse? What recourse do people have to get help when they may not have transportation or phones?

I'd say the same argument applies anywhere else: companies, boarding schools, retirement homes, psychiatric facilities, nuclear families, churches, the list goes on.

Most inspection agencies are performative at best. They'll check for a few key indicators which get swept under the rug when the people know the inspectors are coming. If the inspector is buddies with the administrators or whoever, they're even more lax in their inspections. Whistleblowers get punished, and our legal system quite frequently fails to protect them. And now, even the agencies that are supposed to ensure compliance are being systematically defunded and dismantled, and the remnants are being weaponized for political purposes.

People put a lot of faith in systems that don't deserve it, when beneath it all those systems are run by fallible humans and are just as prone to abuse as anything else. It just happens to be the dominant system and it jealously protects its own monopoly.

Communes don't have to be 100% isolated and cut off from society, the fact that most of them are is a result of the stigma. It leaves them with no other way to be, no other option but to either seclude themselves or return to society and conform.

If society itself were more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, a commune could simply provide layers of abstraction. It could still have inspectors and mediators and contractors and medical professionals from the outside world come visit periodically, but it could handle the internal matters like administration, bookkeeping, logistics, warehouse operations, food prep, cleaning, gardening, etc., and all other internal matters as a team effort where everyone has a role and contributes, instead of the norm in our society which is a bunch of isolated individuals and small families who have to do everything for themselves.

And if they weren't viewed as these inherently scary and abusive things, you wouldn't have exclusively vulnerable people getting preyed on and recruited to them. Lots of people we consider "normal" would choose to join them, for a variety of reasons: pooling resources for shared expenses = lower cost of living; sharing chores = lower burden of upkeep and more free time. Especially now with the cost of living rising, the job market evaporating, and life just overall becoming more complicated, I feel like that would be an attractive option for a lot of people.

And if they were more common, there would be a diversity of philosophical persuasions / guiding values, so anyone would theoretically be able to find one that aligns with their worldview. So as long as you do your research and visit a couple times to get a feel for the particular community before you join, you wouldn't have to worry about things like coercive enforcement of ideology.

My point is that there are ways of doing it healthily, but the very real stigma associated with it prevents any healthy communes from gaining any traction. That's why we only hear about abusive ones. It's confirmation bias mixed with self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's why I say we should break the stigma. It doesn't mean we should allow abusive cults. But by providing healthier alternatives, we'll actually diminish the appeal those abusive cults have for some people.

It's like drugs. Decriminalization is one of the most effective ways to reduce demand for the black market. Likewise, destigmatizing communes will reduce demand for abusive cults.