🍁🏡 The Vermont miracle: How one local platform is rewriting the rules of social media

Read our research study and just-released Washington Post exclusive

The conventional wisdom is that social media is toxic and chaotic. It inevitably makes everything worse. Right? That might be a little too simplistic.

At New_ Public, we believe that the design of online social platforms — and what they choose to prioritize — is a big factor in shaping the content, behavior, and real-world impacts of these spaces. Our theory has always been that if digital products and services utilized less extractive business models and were designed to be more prosocial, this would lead to more public-spirited, positive offline outcomes.

Now we have some data to support this. Along with Talia Stroud, Co-founder of New_ Public and Director of the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, we surveyed more than 13,000 members of a homegrown and family-owned social platform in Vermont called Front Porch Forum. We also asked respondents to compare FPF to both Facebook and Nextdoor. It’s civil, sustainable, and, yes, very popular.

As first reported on by Will Oremus in the Washington Post, our extensive academic research found that among other things, Front Porch Forum is useful, it encourages civic engagement, and it actually strengthens communities. And its users in every city, town and village in Vermont really, really 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.”

Below, I’ll dig into what Front Porch Forum is and how it works. I’ll also unpack the results of the study, which you can review in its entirety in this report that we’ve just released. And I’ll address what this means for our focus on local forums and groups throughout the nation. 

How Front Porch Forum works

It’s easy to dismiss social platforms you haven’t heard of, or that function differently from the more well-known apps and sites. Front Porch Forum may be small by Silicon Valley standards, but it is widely used in Vermont: in a state with just 270,000 households, FPF has 235,000 active members.

FPF is made up of about 200 forums throughout Vermont and in a couple border communities in New York and Massachusetts, most of them specific to individual small towns. Members sign up by location and can read and post to their local forum, as well as read some nearby ones.

New posts and replies are packaged in “issues,” typically published once a day via mobile app, email, and website. FPF is not all-consuming. As co-founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis said in a recent podcast interview, “the basic experience is brief and daily. Five or 10 minutes a day is what we’re looking for.”

Also, as trust and safety appears to be less and less of a priority for the dominant social platforms, FPF stands apart — every submitted post is reviewed by a professional moderator before publication. 

FPF has been running for two decades, and is a family-owned Vermont public benefit corporation. Michael runs it from an office in Burlington with a team of 30, including 12 moderators and three full-stack developers. Like other social networks, FPF does sell ads, but in practice the business is quite different. Rather than build sophisticated adtech to target users, their in-house sales team builds relationships with local advertisers, mainly small businesses and nonprofits. Ads are then targeted only by geography, as opposed to a surveillance-based business model.

Community stewards should explore FPF’s posting guidelines, which offer clear explanations of norms and expectations. Folks building new experimental social media spaces should take a close look at their robust Terms of Use. 

Many posts concern everyday topics, like borrowing tools or sharing recommendations. But those informal messages can lead to offline, reciprocal acts, like helping a neighbor. These many low-stakes, neighborly interactions build social capital. When a majority of neighbors have a sense of each other as mostly trustworthy and reliable, that makes the whole community much stronger and more resilient.

That kind of resilience is invaluable for a community. Vermonters have seen examples of this several times over the course of FPF’s history, most recently with three rounds of serious flooding over the past year and the pandemic before that. During a crisis, or even a passionate debate about a community issue, FPF also serves as a trusted source of information and a crucial communication hub. As Michael told me, “When hard times arrive — in the form of a natural disaster or a difficult school budget debate — FPF members know more of their neighbors and have a history with each other to draw upon.” 

Anecdotally, it’s obvious that FPF members seem to really like the platform and get a lot out of it. But we wanted real data. New_ Public teamed up with Talia and researchers at CME, who designed, administered, and analyzed the survey. We built off our earlier collaborative study, the Civic Signals, which assessed how users from around the world rated the importance and performance of different social media platforms. Here’s some of what we found.

Results of our new study on Front Porch Forum

Overall, Front Porch Forum members perceived the platform positively. Respondents strongly agreed with statements like “I feel connected to the local area where I live on Front Porch Forum,” “I feel like people treat each other humanely on Front Porch Forum,” and “I feel safe on Front Porch Forum.” For every signal, FPF performed better than Nextdoor and Facebook.

But the results go much farther: nearly all respondents — a shocking 97%! — consider FPF to be very valuable (70%) or somewhat valuable (27%) for their community. Why is it so valuable?

For starters, FPF is useful. Another huge portion of respondents, 93%, either found the platform very useful (48%) or somewhat useful (45%) for them and their family. It’s also a great place to learn what’s happening locally: 81% of respondents felt they could become a more informed citizen on FPF, while only 26% said the same about Facebook and 32% about Nextdoor.

On paper, Nextdoor and FPF seem to have a lot in common, but that nearly 50 percentage point delta between FPF and Nextdoor tells us a ton about the difference between the two platforms. FPF not only approaches moderation completely differently than Nextdoor, it also isn’t incentivized to encourage posting as often and divisively as possible.

What members are becoming informed about is also really interesting: When asked what aspects of their communities they learned about from FPF posts, majorities of respondents chose “neighborhood / town community issues” (81%), “opportunities to be more engaged in your neighborhood / town” (61%), and “your neighbors’ perspectives on local issues” (59%).

New_ Public has always assumed that if you can build a thriving digital public space in a local community, that will manifest in changes in real world attitudes and behavior amongst neighbors. Here, we see that happening on FPF. As the report reads, “People who had been on the platform longer, were more active on FPF, and had more positive postings indicated they had learned about more topics and were more civically engaged because of FPF.”

Evidence of this shows up in the kinds of civic-oriented actions FPF members have taken based on postings they’ve seen on their forum: “attended a local event or public meeting” (61%), “discussed local issues with a neighbor” (53%) or “cooperated on a shared community need (e.g., cleaning up public green space or rebuilding a playground)” (19%).

As hinted at above, the authors found that “there was some variation, however, based on member demographics, forum use, and the characteristics of the forum.” These small differences included women having a more positive impression of FPF than men and younger people finding it more useful than older members.

“One important insight is that newer residents evaluate FPF more positively than residents who have been around longer,” says Talia, who’s the lead author on the report. “This may be because FPF helps them orient to their new neighborhood and helps them get to know their community.”

What this tells us about local forums and groups

These findings are really impressive, but as our hero Elinor Ostrom often said: “No panaceas!” FPF might not be a silver bullet for every American town — it grew organically in unique conditions and it might not be so easy to replicate. Besides, a massive expansion isn't currently in the cards. (Michael likens that idea to turning your favorite local restaurant into a thousand-store chain and expecting the food to still taste good.) But FPF gives us real hope, and some of the fundamentals can definitely be borrowed and applied in many different contexts.

We’re deeply inspired by FPF, from its human, calm moderation model and design to its organic, sustainable growth and advertising model. We’re awed by its incredible usefulness for services, connection, and disaster relief. There’s a lot here that might be applicable to other local digital spaces.

Ultimately, Front Porch Forum exemplifies the potential for social media to foster positive, engaged communities. It’s a viable, real life model of a flourishing digital public space in use by hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now it’s up to us to make it less of a rare phenomenon.

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Daydreaming of summers spent splashing in Vermont creeks and rivers,

—Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public