Facebook Neighborhoods

» see facebook.com/neighborhoods as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Calgary was the whole product for a while. Facebook switched Neighborhoods on there in October 2020 as a test in one Canadian city, which is a sensible way to build something local and also, as it turned out, as close to a launch as the product ever got.

Nextdoor is what it was aimed at. Nextdoor had spent a decade building the thing Facebook kept almost having: a verified, address-bound forum where people complained about parking and sold furniture. Facebook already had the users and already had Groups, so the gap was purely one of structure. Neighborhoods gave you a defined area with a feed of the people inside it, plus moderators appointed to read what got posted.

It expanded in steps. More Canadian regions in May 2021, then a hundred and thirty two additional American cities in November 2021, announced alongside a Giving Tuesday push. By the end Meta described it as having reached hundreds of local communities across two countries, and it was still formally a test every single day of that.

~ the dossier ~

~ the second profile ~

The one piece of real design in it was the sub-profile. Joining Neighborhoods did not hand your street your Facebook account. You built a separate short profile for it, with a bio and interests you chose, and you could keep the rest of your public information away from people who merely lived nearby.

That feature is worth more attention than the product got, because of what it concedes. Facebook's founding position, held for fifteen years against enormous pressure, was that one real identity per person was the correct model and the thing that made the network trustworthy. Here was Facebook's own team, building a product for the people physically closest to you, deciding that the single real profile was too much exposure and quietly shipping an alias.

~ a test that never graduated ~

The closure notice went up around 1 September 2022, and the feature stopped being available on 1 October. The product manager who posted it gave no reason. Reporting afterward settled on the explanation Meta had already used for Campus a few months earlier, which is that people should form local communities using Groups.

Nextdoor, for its part, went public in 2021 and is still trading. It kept the one thing Neighborhoods could never get, which is that joining it was an active decision about your address rather than a section you had not noticed inside an app you already had open.

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