Run a local community or neighborhood / neighbourhood Discourse forum?

Community
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Give a shout out if you run a local online group for your local geographic area.

What works?

What do you wished worked better (tech wise or other)?

Are you competing well with local Facebook Groups or have you replaced a former email list?

The reason I am asking is that E-Democracy.org is exploring our future hosting options. We have a custom install of the OS GroupServer.org tool that has served us well, but now is the time to explore what’s next. GroupServer is like an open source Google Groups tool that is an email list with a nice web interface and member directory.

We have 20K+ registered users with about 10K on the active groups. Facebook Groups and NextDoor stole our thunder from our newer groups while those that are older and were well established keep on going and going.

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AFAIK @ChrisBeach runs such a group, perhaps he can offer some tips.

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I think @McBlu does something similar (the community has a wider purpose but it is geographically based) as does @Emilio_F_Castillo

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We are having trouble getting members to transfer from in person to online and are small in membership compared to you. I follow this post with interest.

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Our biggest forums are in the 1500 member range. You need 400 e-list members for organic content generation it seems.

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