The friendliest social network you’ve never heard of
On Front Porch Forum, politics is fair game but unkindness is strictly prohibited.
Washington Post
August 10, 2024
By Will Oremus
Imagine an online community where substantive debates about Donald Trump, climate change and America’s culture wars nestle quietly alongside messages about lost rabbits and school board meetings.
It exists and even thrives — in Vermont. Front Porch Forum counts nearly half the state’s adults as active members. More than Facebook, Nextdoor, Craigslist or their local newspaper, the site is where Vermonters go to interact with their neighbors online — generally without disparaging each other.
At a time when Americans are increasingly disenchanted with social media, researchers are studying Front Porch Forum to try to understand what makes for a kinder, gentler online community — and what Big Tech could learn from it.
A text-heavy, newsletter-based site that reads like a cross between a neighborhood internet mailing list and a small-town newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section, Front Porch Forum seems an unlikely candidate to outcompete the big social media platforms. It has achieved critical mass in the Green Mountain State not by embracing the growth hacks, recommendation algorithms and dopamine-inducing features that power most social networks, but by eschewing them.
New research from the nonprofit New_ Public finds Front Porch Forum is one of the few online spaces in America that leaves its users feeling more informed, more civically engaged and more connected to their neighbors, rather than less so. What’s more, its users seem to genuinely like it.
“I can’t imagine life in rural Vermont without FPF,” said Don Heise of Calais, Vt., (pop. 1,661 according to the 2020 U.S. census), who described it as “the glue that holds our community together.”
The secret to its success: move slowly and moderate heavily.
On Front Porch Forum, there’s no real-time feed, no like button, no recommendation algorithm and no way to reach audiences beyond your local community. It offers users no reward for posting something provocative or sensational, other than the prospect that your neighbors will see it and perhaps bring it up the next time you run into them at the grocery store.
The company “ultimately exists to stimulate real-world interactions among neighbors,” said its founder and CEO, Michael Wood-Lewis. “It doesn’t exist to be an online metaverse. We’re not trying to hold people’s attention online 24/7. We’d love people’s attention for 10 minutes a day.”
While most tech giants view content moderation as a necessary evil, Front Porch Forum treats it as a core function. Twelve of its 30 full-time employees spend their days reading every user post before it’s published, rejecting any that break its rules against personal attacks, misinformation or spam.
The process is slow and laborious, but it seems to work. Front Porch Forum is the highest-scoring platform ever on New_ Public’s “Civic Signals” criteria, which attempt to measure the health of online communities.
“It’s the centerpiece of community engagement in town,” said retired child-welfare professional Tom Zenaty of Shelburne, Vt., (pop. 7,717), who’s been reading his local forum every day for more than 17 years.
Zenaty said the Shelburne forum is “where you go to learn about upcoming meetings, library activities, recreation activities. People are regularly trying to sell or unload for-free items,” like the times he used it to sell a baby stroller and an electric knife sharpener.
But in a town whose local paper comes out just once a week, Front Porch Forum is also a hub for political discussions, Zenaty said.
In July, he joined a pair of debates that played out in parallel over a couple of weeks, each drawing a few posts per day. One concerned a local developer’s plan to build 375 homes on 175 acres of land — a potentially historic expansion for the town. The other touched on a national culture war issue: Tractor Supply Co.’s move to cut its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and abandon its climate commitments in response to conservative pressure campaigns.
The debate over those divisive issues stayed civil, if sometimes testy, on Front Porch Forum. If anyone tried to post an ad hominem attack or denigrate a group of people, there was no evidence of it; such posts are typically rejected by the forum’s moderators before publication.
“I’m just not going to shop there,” posted one liberal resident disappointed in the company’s actions. “Their birdseed is too expensive anyway!”
“We’ve come to expect within the FPF community that this is a place where respectful exchange can happen about issues of concern,” Zenaty said, contrasting that with “the attack mode” he sees elsewhere online, including in X and Facebook.
Front Porch users’ satisfaction shows how careful moderation and prioritizing civility over engagement can lead to a vastly different experience of social media, said Eli Pariser, co-director of New_ Public and author of “The Filter Bubble.”
“I think there’s a real social media fatalism that has set in, that it’s just irredeemably toxic and never going to get any better,” Pariser said. “The goal here is to demonstrate that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. That’s a result of the business model and how they’re designed.”
Wood-Lewis launched Front Porch Forum in 40 Vermont neighborhoods in 2006 after several years running a neighborhood internet mailing list in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city with a population of 44,646. An engineer by training, Wood-Lewis was constantly tinkering with different ways of running the mailing list.
Should users be anonymous or identified by their real names? (Real names were best for building community, he decided.) Should people outside a neighborhood be allowed to join? (Not if you wanted to keep it feeling safe and intimate.) What about local businesses? (Sure, but they have to pay to advertise; local ads make up most of the company’s revenue.) Should any topics be off-limits? (Not necessarily, but certain behaviors should be.)
Most of all, he learned what the moderator of almost any successful online forum learns: If you don’t set and strongly enforce rules for how people can talk to each other, things will get ugly in a hurry.
“What we say is, attack the issue, not the neighbor,” Wood-Lewis said. “If your issue is a barking dog or hypodermic needles in the park, then let’s talk about that. But don’t say, ‘This particular person’ or ‘This particular dog.’ We can’t fact-check that, and you could totally destroy someone’s reputation.”
Front Porch Forum caught on quickly and began expanding across the state. In 2011, it played a leading role in mutual aid during major flooding. Growth surged again during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, when people used the site to offer masks and coordinate grocery drop-offs for elderly neighbors. Flooding the last two years spurred fresh bursts of sign-ups and activity, with the site now claiming 235,000 active members in a state with about 265,000 households.
While Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have sought to frame their networks as forums for free speech, Wood-Lewis said he thinks of Front Porch Forum more like a corner pub. If a patron starts making a ruckus, moderators ask him to tone it down — then toss him out if he doesn’t comply.
In rare instances, the site imposes a “topic timeout,” temporarily shutting down a debate the moderators feel has turned sour. That happened with arguments about a wastewater bond in Westford (pop. 2,062) and the U.S. Postal Service in Hinesburg (pop. 4,698). But Wood-Lewis said the beauty of careful moderation is that, over time, most users learn to adhere to the site’s norms on their own.
For several weeks, the site granted The Washington Post access to several local forums to get a sense of what they’re like. Most posts were apolitical, like one in Braintree, Vt., (pop. 1,207) offering chicken eggs for sale that noted, “Our girls are busy … well, except for Karen. She’s a little broody right now. But we still have too many eggs! $4 per dozen.”
In Marshfield and neighboring Plainfield, which were battered by historic floods in July for the second straight summer, most posts were about finding shelter and helping neighbors in need. But the discussion also ranged to climate change, with one resident raising the fraught question of whether it made sense to rebuild in an area whose flood risk may only grow in the years to come.
New_ Public’s survey of more than 13,000 Front Porch users, led by University of Texas at Austin communications professor Talia Stroud, found that 81 percent reported feeling like the site makes them a “more informed citizen.” Just 26 percent of respondents said the same about Facebook and 32 percent about Nextdoor. Respondents were also more likely to report feeling safe and free to speak their minds on Front Porch Forum than on other social networks.
“It’s not totally shocking that the ‘slow food’ of social media is coming from Vermont,” a state famous for artisanal small businesses, Pariser said, acknowledging the model might not translate easily to larger, more diverse states. “But Vermont also has a class divide. And one of the things we think is notable about Front Porch Forum is it seems to kind of bridge those divides.”
While Wood-Lewis is experimenting with an expansion into Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York, he said he intends to keep it to a manageable size, and he has rejected offers to sell it to a larger company.
“I agree that something like we’re doing is needed in a way that’s not being provided in the vast majority of the country,” he said. “But if you scale up a successful small enterprise, you by definition will lose what’s special about it.” And that is something Vermonters would likely protest — civilly, of course.