HN Explorer

Show HN: Little site to help connect the people on your street together

9 points by alance ↗ HN
Sooo I got to thinking about how I don't really want to be FB friends with the people on my street, but that it would still be pretty useful to be able to chat about local issues with my neighbours.

https://streetmates.net

This idea probably isn't going to appeal to HN much. It's not very revolutionary. But there sort of seems to be a bit of a gap for this level of geographically-close, online communication.

I'm thinking of approaching the marketing side of it with small flyers in people's mailboxes, just keep it small, target a street at a time, so that there's a bit of localized inertia in the signups. It definitely has the chicken-and-egg problem (i.e. why would I sign up when no-one on my street has signed up).

If anyone's got any comments, ideas or feedback - then please shout out. There's no monetization strategy behind it (yet), and I very much like the idea of helping to facilitate the creation of little street communities.

10 comments

[ 88.3 ms ] story [ 1221 ms ] thread
barneythedino
Thats an excellent idea, really like it. Unfortunately I think it's going to be a problem getting traction, most of my neighbours are retired and not computer literate. But I hope it work out.
alance
Hey that's so nice to get a bit of support. Thank you.

Yeah, I feel like whatever it ends up looking like, it's going to have to be kept super simple/accessible.

Wondering about the traction problem too - but I guess, there's no real hurry...

robtherobber
Another potentially problematic aspect of it is that, if it does take off with the people on my street, my inbox is going to hurt, as I receive all posts.
milanspeaks
Over here in India, we have solved this issue with WhatsApp groups.
alance
Does that mean you'd need to have their phone number first, like everyone would need to be a WhatsApp contact?

I guess my approach is aimed more toward casual acquaintances, where you might not know the people on your street very well at all, let alone have their phone number. (but I might be misunderstanding how whatsapp groups work).

qnsi
for my neighbourhood in Poland Facebook group does that. In USA don't you have nextdoor for this?
alance
That's almost similar to what I'm aiming for. But it (nextdoor) seem very keen to validate an exact person's house address. Not sure how I feel about that. I started signing up and kind of got turned off by the house address confirmation stuff.

Guess it's double-edged though, if you don't confirm a person's exact residence then anyone could read the locality's discussions ... tricky.

Is there something inherently wrong with a random person signing up to a particular neighbourhood's group chat? These aren't exactly going to be super-private conversations if they're with everyone on your street ... and I want to encourage community building ... not necessarily GATED-community building. The end goal is world harmony, not several billion factions.

codingdave
I do think this idea is valid. But I've also seen this idea come and go over the last couple decades half a dozen times. I wish I could even remember the names of the folks who have tried it before. If you could research some old attempts at it, and find the founders, having some"lessons learned" conversations with them might save yourself some stumbles and you could get farther with it.
quickthrower2
If you are all for privacy then please ask for only the street name not the full address.

This means no online discoverability : you have to talk to your neighbours to get a link, but thats a good thing.

It also means the geographic boundary is flexible. In the city it might be a floor of an apartment block. In the suburbs a street, or maybe 2 adjoining streets, and in rural areas a region several km around a village.

Then it can get other non-street but local usages: parents of a school class, local yoga members etc.

Also less coding: just store a string!

An example of what the page will look like with posts might make it more enticing too.

Good luck. Keep selling it!

I like the idea, the big barrier for me as a user is being embarrassed to contact all the neighbours that I don’t know well. Or fear that no one would join. Maybe some advise about how to tackle that would be good. Or some feel good story of a benefit you got from using it.

alance
Yeah I'm in two minds about obtaining the precise street address.

On the one hand there is actually nothing to stop you just entering a street name and omitting your residence number - I think it will still setup the notice board and email group exactly the same.

And there is nothing to stop anyone from putting in some other street number than their own. There's no easy way to validate the correctness of that info - and it would be invasive to try.

There might be something useful that can be done with the street number though, I'm not sure. The flexibility of the geographic boundary is basically as general as the google maps API search. So it can be very broad.

As far as yoga groups or parents school groups etc are concerned, it seems like that domain is covered by FB...

I'm keen on fostering better street communities. Very light connections. Making it possible to do things like borrowing tools from each other, or creating a little veggie garden for the street, encouraging the sharing of resources with your neighbours. There's so much overlap and waste with everything...

And e.g. you probably wouldn't lend your spade to some random in your neighbourhood, but maybe lending it to the guy who lives across the road, is less of a big deal. After all - you know where he lives.

Love what you said about having a feel good story, and creating an example notice board page. Thank you will do!