I just realized that I can enable the communities alpha on ios in the app settings.
I want to make a new community to test it out, but is the alpha only for public communities? Will i be able to delete the test later?
For now communities are public, yes
Currently we don’t provide an option to delete communities, but if you don’t share it, no one will actually see it, as they are not discoverable, so I’d encourage you to play with it 
Feedback will be very welcome!
Will Private communities require some kind of monetization system? because only those in the community will benefit from having the unlisted community. so it’s just taking up bandwidth on nodes.
so what is the plan to incentivize nodes to route traffic? will we eventually make micropayments to send messages to support node operators?
A Status nodes program is being developed. It pays our SNT to node runners for routing traffic. You can follow the marketing discord for more information.
I’m not aware of any “micropayments” to send message (I believe sending messages will always be free).