Founded in 2010 and based in San Francisco, Nextdoor is a odd outlier among today’s social networks. Signing up is an onerous process, requiring substantial proof of both your identification and address. People post messages, but they are seen only by others in the immediate area, and there is no share or retweet button to proliferate messages across the network. It feels more like a modern update on a message board or web forum than a social network. But it has struck a chord across the country. When The Verge first reported on Nextdoor back in July of 2012, it was in 3,500 neighborhoods. Today, the company is announcing that it reached 40,000 neighborhoods, or roughly one in four American communities, with 10 or more active users.
I had never heard of Nextdoor, but it sounds fascinating. Where Facebook has become an endless stream of crap because people willy-nilly added everyone to their friends list (tip: don’t do that. I mostly only ‘friend’ people I truly care about and lo and behold, my Facebook feed is always interesting), Nextdoor prevents that by focusing solely on the people around you – literally around you.
I would love for this to come to The Netherlands. Sounds very useful in, say, remote communities.
Yeah, we badly need a Facebook killer. I need Facebook but I hate that I need it …
This is not a Facebook killer. It seems to serve a completely different purpose than Facebook.
Anyway, it seems like a good idea. Who, in this day and age, is going to just knock on doors and introduce yourself to your neighbors? For all you know, they could be batshit crazy
In the apartment I live in, my car has been broken into twice. I’d say there’s a decent chance it was one of my neighbors.
Unfortunately, I don’t see it catching on well enough to “kill” Facebook, despite its explosive growth. It serves a completely different purpose, one already served by the Groups subset of Facebook. I’m a member of two local community groups on Facebook; one from my hometown, and one from my current town, and I am also still “friends” with faraway friends and family, something Nextdoor doesn’t offer.
Now, should Facebook eat itself to death, I can certainly see this service stepping in to fill the community void. And sadly, should Facebook ever die, it will be long after rivals like Google+ have folded or transformed themselves into something else entirely. I get the feeling lately that Google+ is being propped up largely by the Ingress gaming community; my own use of the service only really took off after I started playing that game, and those Community pages are by far the most active. Then again, the other Communities I belong to on G+ are things like amateur radio, hardware hacking, and alternative OSes, so my perception may be narrowed.
Since you asked, I do.
Crazy people have always existed in the past and will always exist in the future. All I can do is try to get along with as many people as possible.
I’d say if you’re going to go knocking on your neighbors’ doors, it pays to find out a little about the neighborhood first, especially if you’re new to the area. I’m lucky in that I don’t live in a subdivision (doubly lucky that there is no HOA/covenant in my area); I have exactly one “next door” neighbor who is a sweet old lady, a cemetery across the street, a church on the other side, and a forest behind me.
But I’ve lived in neighborhoods where the neighbors all hate each other for no reason, and knocking on their doors is likely to end with the cops called at the very least. Then again, I’ve lived in neighborhoods where there was a real community and everyone helped one another out. The latter is where I think a service like this would take off, and the former is where it is needed most but probably wouldn’t take hold.
I didn’t mean that this will be the facebook killer. Only that we need one
That is a brilliant idea, as long as they don’t grow in to a facebook
I’m not on Facebook. I keep in contact with my friends by meeting up, emailing, and talking on the phone.
I don’t know a convenient way of sharing photos but I was never in the habit of sharing photos so that’s no loss.
Really, just leave Facebook. It’s no big deal.
That approach is all well and good, but it relies on your friends having a similar attitude to yourself. I use Facebook all the time, but have occasionally gone for weeks without touching it. What happens then is I miss out on things since my friends all use it as an alternative to texting and phoning, and then I get the like “I sent you a message on Facebook. Didn’t you get it?” or “I put that photo up on Facebook for you, didn’t you see it?”
I don’t like it, but in my circles anyway it has come to be one of the main means of communication so I miss out badly if I don’t use it.
My experience is that when you tell people you don’t use facebook, they’ll send important stuff to everyone by mail.
But everyone, and their circles, are different. But I do think it’s a big problem to have our communication controlled by companies (especially just one company, and especially a company based in a country where the government agencies have such control over such companies). And I think we each have to find our way to get out of this mess.
Boycotting facebook works for me. It’s inconvenient sometimes, but I can live with that. If a fifth of your cirlces bycotted facebook, I’d guess the problem you described would go away.
I know there are sites that only allow a Facebook login.
It’s stupid and kind of scary.
Not that I use any of those sites, but I know they exist.
I prefer talking with people directly, without internet. And you don’t need a computer to talk with neighboors. But sometimes there are friends, who live galaxies away from you, and they are still your friends. So it is amazing that we are able to talk with them.
I’m not a “Facebook” person, so I should keep my mouth closed on this topic. But as you mentioned “talk with neighbors” (where “talk” refers to using the mouth, the sears, and most importantly the brain, in opposite to “talk via ‘Facebook'”), I’d like to share the following article:
Brian Bethune:
The end of neighbours
How our increasingly closed-off lives are poisoning our politics and endangering our health
http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-end-of-neighbours/
Please note that I do not show any opinion myself here. I just think this article is worth being considered in a discussion related to “Facebook”, especially when people say it’s about openness, sharing and communicating, and others say it’s not more than a walled garden where the inmates are the property of the corporation that makes the walls and shows them pretty pictures…
How is it monetized?
https://help.nextdoor.com/customer/portal/articles/807212-how-does-n…
It is not a subscription model, and they say they will not sell private information to other companies. Based on that alone, I can predict with 100% accuracy it will either:
a. Fail.
b. Turn into another Facebook.
There is no c.
I’m still waiting for someone serious to develop a social network based on a co-operative revenue model – but no one will because venture capitalist want to make obscene profits…
There is also Diaspora:
https://joindiaspora.com/
It is decentralized. The code open source and it is developed by volunteers and they ask for donations.
I guess it is the same model as Wikimedia/Wikipedia.
Because it is decentralized and open source you can also set up your own if you don’t trust others to run it for you.
I live in Portland, Oregon. I use Nextdoor all the time. A significant percentage of the people in my neighborhood use Nextdoor (though not a majority).
I find it’s most useful when dealing with situations that are neighborhood-specific. “Watch out for this guy, he’s been going door to door with the same ‘my car broke down’ story for weeks, asking for money…”, “Anybody know a good plumber in the neighborhood?”, “I cut my tree down and everyone’s welcome to the firewood for free”, etc.
My neighborhood is higher crime than some in the city, and I think it’s especially nice to have neighbors looking out for each others’ safety. Because of this, Nextdoor feels particularly useful in an urban context to me. Though I don’t doubt rural communities might find it very useful too.
Two words: Mesh Network
One of the defining, core concepts, of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, was to have collaborative local area mesh networks so their users could communicate with and among their local “Nextdoor Neighbors” without having the benefit of the full internet 24-7.
Seems to me that this “Nextdoor” project is designed backwards. Central server based rather than federated.
The reason for the onerous signup is to be sure you are in fact local.
A mesh network is by definition and physical limitations (currently), local, private and FREE.
It is encouraging that this type of local-only community connectivity is catching on as it is. Converted to mesh networks, it could be the seed of broader mesh network adoption, and all its core, future implications, once it’s use is common place in vast numbers of neighborhoods.
Source code for the basic software? OLPC project.
That, and the price of a compatible wireless USB dongle (if even needed).
The OLPC collaborative mesh network concept wasn’t meant only as a basic communication option between third world people living in mud-huts, but as a safe and locally private way also for children/people in large condo and apartment complexes (townships even) in the west and all over to be exclusively connected. Even during dire emergencies (no ISPs to route through).
Great concept–Lose the central server…
The problem is, it didn’t work so well.
Mesh networking on a large scale is still problematic.
It’s a cool idea and I think it will eventually be solved, but it will take time.
I wouldn’t consider it a ‘solved problem’:
http://battlemesh.org/
WiFi is actually pretty sucky technology, I wish somebody would actually fix that first.
Edited 2014-08-21 10:58 UTC
I hope they only use the data for the sign up process and, once approved, is discarded.
But this is very not OS related. Would be nice to keep at least somewhat to the topic.
When attempting to sign up, they asked me why I was interested in bringing Nextdoor to my neighborhood. WTF? I have never even used it, and they want me to explain why I want to bring in other users in my area? How about letting me use it and then letting me decide if it’s worth introducing to my neighbors?
Adam