Category Archives: Big Tech

Best of FPF: To the Guy in the Truck

Posted on Friday, February 21, 2025 by No comments yet

Bridget shared this harrowing tale in their Winooski Forum. We thought it was well worth a share:

“Couple Saturdays ago, I was out walking, and somehow tripped and fell on the street — broke my wrist, and banged myself up pretty good. I was a couple blocks from home, and thought I could make it, but when I started getting light headed, we went to plan B. My partner flagged down the first vehicle she saw, and asked for help.

This is one reason why I love this city: the guy driving the pickup she stopped immediately jumped out and helped me into the truck — got me home safe and sound. Thank you so much, guy in the truck! I didn’t get his name, but I know he had just been ice fishing, and mentioned visiting his sister here in Winooski. I hope sometime I get to pay back this kindness.”

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

Posted on Friday, February 14, 2025 by No comments yet

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)

A Recipe for a Better Internet

Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2023 by No comments yet

What would the internet look like if it weren’t dominated by a few huge corporations?  And is such an internet even possible? A few smart folks at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure have some really interesting ideas about what a more humane and diverse internet might look like.  In a short, highly readable paper called “The Three Legged Stool: A Manifesto for a Smaller, Denser Internet”, they outline a different world and explain how to make it happen.The “three legged stool” refers to the three core principles of a better internet:

  1. A “pluriverse” — as in, plural universe — in which the large platforms are complemented (and challenged) by a diversity of Very Small Online Platforms, or VSOPs.  “Just as we do not exclusively gather in shopping malls in the physical world, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are not the right place for every community and conversation online,” they explain.
  2. A “loyal client” that allows people to follow, read, and post as they wish, across multiple platforms.  They describe this as analogous to how your email client — whether you use Gmail, or Outlook, or something small like Hey — allows you to email anyone, regardless of what email client they use.  And the “loyal” part means you get to both pick a client and adjust its settings to align with your own preferences. 
  3. A “friendly neighborhood algorithm store” where VSOPs can pay a reasonable price to access capabilities that, at present, only the big guys can afford:  things like recommender systems, spam detection, and anti-abuse tools.  Just as small businesses have access to high-powered tools for accounting, payroll, and other core functions, small online platforms should be able to provide high-quality experiences without having to spend billions to develop it all from scratch.

Front Porch Forum is a strong believer in a diverse and people-centric internet.  We’re pleased to be working towards that future in the company of smart and committed folks like these.  Let’s build a better internet together!