Haha, Christophe, I could have written this. I run two also. I have a smaller site too.
I built it to replace a Yahoo mail group which was used for ‘our building’. There are five buildings in the development. It’s competing with two FB groups mainly focussed on one of the other larger buildings and I have a passionate irrational hatred for closed FB groups. Why does everything have to be FB these days?! I presume it’s also competing with NextDoor … but i’ve not even dared to look on there (my bad). It’s been very hard to grow the user base from my building. I’ve found physical social networking (‘talking to neighbours’) to be the best strategy.
I think this is a special use case … people still post, but only when they need to. Not everyone wants to be close to and share with their neighbours. We have a problem ‘angry’ neighbour’ who is on the site … I’m sure she puts people off. I’ve had to moderate her comments several times … a much more tricky step when dealing with physical neighbours you need to get on with in the real world …
It makes for a rather luxurious mailing group, but it’s definitely far more fun to administrate and it’s obviously way more feature rich and pretty to look at!