Ghost of Midnight

Front Porch Forum is Part of “Why We Shouldn’t Give Up on the Internet”

New_ Public’s Eli Pariser Delivers a Speech at the Vatican Featuring Front Porch Forum

Eli Pariser is an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. He helped lead MoveOn.org, co-founded Upworthy, wrote “The Filter Bubble,” and is currently Co-Director of New_ Public. He has highlighted Front Porch Forum in numerous pieces and conversations, shining a light on its ability to lead to healthier communities thanks to its intentional design. 

You can imagine our surprise – and delight – when he delivered a powerful speech to an audience that included Pope Francis at the Vatican’s Jubilee of the World of Communications – and put Front Porch Forum at the heart of his argument for “why we shouldn’t give up on the Internet.” 

Here’s a highlight:

In Vermont, a small state in the northeast of the United States, people use Facebook and TikTok but town conversation mostly doesn’t happen there. They have something more like an actual digital town square — a home-grown social network called Front Porch Forum built specifically for the purpose of allowing towns to have good discussions.

Front Porch Forum has never taken venture capital and isn’t seeking to make a ton of money from advertisers. In fact, it’s a public benefit corporation that is not intended to make more money than is required to sustain itself. It’s always been built not for advertisers but to serve communities in Vermont first. And as a result, it can do conversations differently. 

Because it doesn’t need to worry primarily about advertisers or engagement, instead of optimizing for the most posts possible, FPF optimizes for thoughtfulness — by updating only once a day. It’s a bold statement that says: slow down. Think about what you’re saying. And say something meaningful. And among other things, it makes having a flame war really arduous, because you have to be willing to carry it on for days at a time. 

One of the things that FPF shows us is that these aren’t places we need to spend a lot of time for them to change us and foster stronger communities.

In our offline lives, places of worship are a great example of this: Even among the faithful, there are few that spend a large proportion of our time literally inside a church or synagogue or mosque or temple. But the parts of us that are nourished by these spaces remain fortified when we leave. 

The same is true of the digital public spaces — we don’t need to vanquish Meta or TikTok entirely to make digital space building worth doing. People use Instagram in Vermont too… but FPF adds to their lives. 

Front Porch Forum also puts its money where its mouth is when it comes to stewardship — in fact, while only a tiny fraction of people at TikTok or Meta work as moderators, at the 40-person organization of Front Porch Forum, half of the employees are paid moderators. 

With this ratio of stewards to content, every single message can be read before it reaches everyone else to make sure it conforms to the very clear and thoughtful set of norms that have been co-developed over 20 years with community members. And when messages don’t — which happens sometimes — they don’t just disappear. Instead, you get a friendly note from one of the stewards asking you to phrase things differently. 

And so, conversation goes better. People know their neighbors better. Communities are healthier. We conducted survey research on Front Porch Forum’s impact and found that not only did people across the political spectrum and across demographics like it much more than Facebook or Nextdoor, they also got more involved in the life of their town and were more committed neighbors as a result.

Of course, Front Porch Forum only exists in one small state in the United States. In most places around the country and the globe, these local conversations happen in forums like Facebook Groups and Nextdoor that are much less well designed for this purpose. But at New_ Public, the nonprofit R&D lab I run, we think Front Porch Forum is on to something big. 

Read all about the experience in this New_ Public blog post.

Read the speech in its entirety here.

Watch and listen to Eli’s address (the bit about Front Porch Forum can be found at the 32-minute mark)