Sharing your life with others was originally a strange concept, especially when you considered you were literally giving up complete control of your body. Usually when someone joined a cluster, it led to friends concerned about identity theft or abuse. There was also the concern that they were giving up their individuality to join a borg like collective. However, they didn't get the idea of what the cluster was about.
Variety is the spice of life. Even if you love your job, friends, and family, haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to be someone else? To live in another country, to look different, or work in a different field. Maybe a photographer wanted to know what it was like to be the subject of the camera, or an office worker want to try a more artistic field like dancing.
Each cluster member had an obligation to keep the life of the body they were in intact to the best of their abilities. They wanted to live each other's lives, but they wanted them to be good lives. This led to awkwardness with relationships at times. If a cluster member got married, the spouse was married to the body, so each cluster member would act as the spouse while in that body, and divorce wasn't an option unless the cluster agreed on it. Usually it took awhile for friends and family to get used to it but most adapted and accepted it eventually.
Still, when someone first joined, those around them often had trouble knowing how to treat the inhabitants of their friends bodies. The rule was, treat them like you always did, but it was hard when your petite girlfriend had a 6'2 gym bro in control of her body. While they typically tried to act like the body's original inhabitant, there were usually obvious differences they couldn't help.
Each cluster had their own system on how they kept each other up to date on their lives, and when they swapped. Some clusters were a close group of friends who grew up together while others were flung to the edges of the world and never met in person.
Joining a cluster was also difficult since you were giving a new person free real-estate in all the members bodies. To join an existing one, the vote has to be unanimous. As for how to form one on your own, that was also difficult. There wasn't one set way about it. Meeting people at swap meets or in forums, whatever they did, a cluster just seemed to form eventually. Typically everyone was close in age, but besides each group was different.
The member of this cluster is