[vijayboyapati]

One of the things I found frustrating about Nextdoor when I used it a year ago was that it defines the neighborhood for you. I have a mailing list I created several years ago for my street which has been a very effective way of communicating with each other, especially since we have a street block party every year and a lot of families on the street have kids who play with each other. But there's not way to create a micro-neighborhood where messages only go to other folks in the micro-community (unless they've recently added that feature). When I look at my defined neighborhood now I'm not even sure how they chose the boundaries. It doesn't correspond to neighborhood in the normal sense (capitol hill in Seattle), or to zipcode. It seems like some arbitrarily carved out chunk of my zipcode... weird.

[tacoman]

I tried to setup a mailing list a few times. What I found out is that even though I live in neighbourhood where most people are white collar and sit at a computer all day long, a lot of people don't use email outside of work. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, various business analysts of different types - none of them use email other than to sign up for whatever social networks they use.

[lloydde]

I had the same experience as you. The Alameda, CA neighborhood I'm in was huge on ND. What I really didn't enjoy was all the forum complaining being directly delivered to my email box. NextDoor has a very large job in balancing the personal and personality that makes up neighborhoods and the impersonality of online discussions.

[ddlatham]

I'm also in Alameda and recently setup a email group and directory for our neighborhood that also has block parties and neighborhood watch meetings. Shoot me an email if you want to compare notes.

[hornd]

Hm, also in Alameda, but my neighborhood seems to be mostly ads. Seems to be really hit or miss.

[pests]

I just searched for my address and no neighborhood is defined yet. It's asking me to set up a new neighborhood and asking for me to define the boundaries.

[flavor8]

> One of the things I found frustrating about Nextdoor when I used it a year ago was that it defines the neighborhood for you.

That's not true. When you set up a neighborhood (if you are the first to do so) you can define the neighborhood house-by-house or by drawing a boundary. I don't know how they handle boundary disputes.

Regarding subgroups, you can create discussion groups within the neighborhood, and make access limited / invite only. So you could have a street by street set of groups, so each group would get general neighborhood plus street only content.

[gry]

At a Hack for Change, we started something along these lines. Ideally there would be your predefined neighborhoods and your trusted neighbors. This is an exercise to move towards that idea.

https://github.com/unsay/vicini

[dredmorbius]

There are a lot of different demographic / geographic boundaries. Among them: ZIP codes, ZIP+4, census blocks, census tracts.

At higher levels: urban boundaries, MSA, SMA, and CSA, usually defined along county (or parish or borough) boundaries.

[hayksaakian]

They let you wee who your "lead" is in your list of offices. Usually that person will be the one who would know about why lines were drawn a certain way