I would like to develop a social network with groups for each street in a town. Suggestions?
In Discourse groups are collections of users. Categories are collections of topics. You can use groups to control access to categories. It’s sort-of a bad idea to have hundreds of categories (tags are lighter weight), but it’s less-bad now than it was a while back.
You might use tags for the streets, perhaps having some tags muted by default.
Unless you want to control who can see other streets, you might not need to use group/category permissions to manage that.
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Not sure how long these streets are or how many people are on each, but that seems pretty micro for a community. I’m not sure if you’ve looked through how Nextdoor is set up with neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any commentary for you that’s helpful technically. No idea if you can import topics or categories from CSV. Curious though.
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The Locations Plugin might be a very useful start but it doesn’t presently group anyone.
However it does get you to the point where you can record users accurate addresses …
Oh and you can give a Topic a location too …
Combine the two and could give you a very interesting Topic List query …
This would be a really interesting project.
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Perfectly explained.. THANKS
Barney
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Wow…that is worth a thought. I am trying to build a social network for a Town where groups start with apartment blocks (Condos), then Zip Codes then the entire town
This could be so powerful
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Hi Barney – Just thinking of how I might join a town forum to talk about local topics… but not if it meant registering my street address, or participating in narrow geographic groups or categories that would make my location obvious. Feels like “we’re in the same town” should be enough.
So, I’m curious about the division of things by condo, street, block, etc. Are you planning something that requires this granularity?
I would want to give you a word of caution: too many small groups will lead to a lot of quiet groups, it’s not fun to be in a community with 3 other people.
I’ve always been enamoured by the strategy Nextdoor took when starting out. They required 10 “founding members” to unlock a neighbourhood.
I think you could do something similar, but manual, where you unlock smaller and smaller subcommunities when membership rises.
So you’d start with maybe 5 areas for your town and only subdivide them (eventually ending up on street level?) when you reach a certain amount of members (maybe 100?).
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You may not need groups at all if you are not concerned about privacy and all topics are public, only filtering topics by proximity.
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I live in one of four apartments in a large house here in Tunbridge Wells. There is a need for residents in this house to chat, organise and plan maintenance in a confidential forum. So yes, it’s a small group, but it’s a highly functional one, and one that cannot be satisfied by either Facebook or Nextdoor. Members in our house group would automatically be members of a larger zipcode group and would also be members of a group for the whole town group.
The groups have to be private. If our house had a rat infestation we wouldn’t want the Town to know.
It’s great to have this conversation
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Yes so maybe a combo of both. You would presumably still want some topics to be public and have more global reach (visibility driven by proximity)