The bulletin board theory of community

Every place that works has a bulletin board. Sometimes it is literal: cork, pushpins, a lost-cat flyer overlapping a guitar-lessons flyer. Sometimes it is a person: the barber, the librarian, the woman at the counter who knows which plumber calls back. A bulletin board has three properties software keeps getting wrong. It is local, so everything on it is plausibly yours. It is finite, so attention is not the product. And it is owned by nobody, so the deli flyer and the school play get the same real estate. Most social platforms fail all three. They are global, infinite, and owned. The feed does not care that you live here. The design principle I keep coming back to: build the software version of the cork board. Finite sections instead of infinite scroll. Local by default instead of local as a filter. And the county's stuff, arranged plainly, instead of an algorithm's idea of engagement. Pushpins optional.