Hey All,
I’m in the US and looking for an alternative to the Nextdoor app that allows me to connect with my neighbors, and possibly includes a marketplace. The current state of Nextdoor’s racism and transphobia makes it unusable. I even live in a relatively progressive part of the US. I would really love to have an app that lives up to the standards it claims to have. I know that’s a BIG ask though. Thanks!
Nextdoor hasn’t been about connecting actual neighbors for quite a while now. It’s mostly a regional feed that’s populated by many surrounding cities. The feed used to be the people who literally lived on the blocks around your home.
It’s also become a hot spot for MAGA trolls and elderly folks who’ve gone down the Fox News rabbit hole.
It’s particularly hilarious to look at a hot posts in a location like Berkeley, CA - a VERY liberal city. The comments are overwhelmingly right wing, and are from far outside the city. It’s no longer a tool that allows neighbors to chat about what their actual community cares about.
So the answer would be to make a Lemmy sub for dudes neighbourhood and advertise locally.
We found that we got the most engagement by sticking with a platform (email) that everyone was already using on a daily basis. Neighborhood messages aren’t super frequent. We get a thread or two a week, and people would forget to check a platform for neighborhood messages if it didn’t also have messages for other important things in their lives.
Email is actually a pretty good medium for this kind of thing. No need to over complicate it.