Front Porch Forum: How one local platform in Vermont is rewriting the rules of social media

[JoelR]

How Front Porch Forum works?

It’s easy to dismiss social platforms you haven’t heard of, or that function differently from the more well-known apps and sites. Front Porch Forum may be small by Silicon Valley standards, but it is widely used in Vermont: in a state with just 270,000 households, FPF has 235,000 active members.

FPF is made up of about 200 forums throughout Vermont and in a couple border communities in New York and Massachusetts, most of them specific to individual small towns. Members sign up by location and can read and post to their local forum, as well as read some nearby ones.

New posts and replies are packaged in “issues,” typically published once a day via mobile app, email, and website. FPF is not all-consuming. As co-founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis said in a recent podcast interview, “the basic experience is brief and daily. Five or 10 minutes a day is what we’re looking for.”

Also, as trust and safety appears to be less and less of a priority for the dominant social platforms, FPF stands apart — every submitted post is reviewed by a professional moderator before publication. 

FPF has been running for two decades, and is a family-owned Vermont public benefit corporation. Michael runs it from an office in Burlington with a team of 30, including 12 moderators and three full-stack developers. Like other social networks, FPF does sell ads, but in practice the business is quite different. Rather than build sophisticated adtech to target users, their in-house sales team builds relationships with local advertisers, mainly small businesses and nonprofits. Ads are then targeted only by geography, as opposed to a surveillance-based business model.

Community stewards should explore FPF’s posting guidelines, which offer clear explanations of norms and expectations. Folks building new experimental social media spaces should take a close look at their robust Terms of Use.

Many posts concern everyday topics, like borrowing tools or sharing recommendations. But those informal messages can lead to offline, reciprocal acts, like helping a neighbor. These many low-stakes, neighborly interactions build social capital. When a majority of neighbors have a sense of each other as mostly trustworthy and reliable, that makes the whole community much stronger and more resilient.

That kind of resilience is invaluable for a community. Vermonters have seen examples of this several times over the course of FPF’s history, most recently with three rounds of serious flooding over the past year and the pandemic before that. During a crisis, or even a passionate debate about a community issue, FPF also serves as a trusted source of information and a crucial communication hub. As Michael told me, “When hard times arrive — in the form of a natural disaster or a difficult school budget debate — FPF members know more of their neighbors and have a history with each other to draw upon.” 

Reference: https://newpublic.substack.com/p/the-vermont-miracle-how-one-local