My apartment complex has a Facebook group that serves the same purpose. It’s kind of a mess.
Last week someone posted their security camera footage showing some homeless guy (in his-vis) casing their patio. The neighborhood watch quickly confirmed this scumbag had been poking around the property for days. A police report was created. People went out looking for him.
A couple hours later, the maintenance guy replies to the thread saying the guy is a contractor fixing damaged decks. There are signs up everywhere about it. People got email notifications. And yet they still found a way to create a panic and also waste the cops’ time.
Any time there’s a “popular” thread in that group, it’s always something like that.
My advice is to never join any online community with your neighbors. It’ll just scare you by how fucking stupid the average person is.
I've seen a few people shit talk discord without expanding, so I will: it's a proprietary "public space" that's not web searchable. I don't mind something like a community/subreddit oriented around a physical place, but I try to avoid supporting spaces that are owned by private capital. Of course that's nearly impossible, but there are degrees of enclosure.
I come online to somewhat get away from the 'real world', the last thing I want to do is engage in small talk with the local population. You know what kind of people would end up the most vocal on there too, so fuck no.
I'm not sure but we have a Next Door. I quit that after a couple of weeks because it was just a bunch of people bitching about homeless people being around but not wanting to help or understanding they're still neighbors.
I live in a county that is very strongly divided on several issues. Nextdoor has to constantly remove posts for excess intensity. A discord would rapidly devolve into death threats.
My town has one. And I honestly wish it didn't. On one hand I can see why it's nice to have something like that: quick communication in case an emergency happens, you can tell people directly about events and such that might be happening around the area, you can get to know some of your neighbors if you so choose.
I don't like it because the one for my town is just your basic chatroom, except everyone knows everyone else lives within 10 miles or so of each other. It feels gross to me, and I'm not entirely sure why. It's populated by adults anywhere from their 20s to their 50s and 60s, as well as teenagers between the ages of 13-19. It just gives me the ick when I see someone in their 40s being very friendly to a teen in a chatroom.
We have one for my city centered around socializing and meeting people. We haven't been getting any of the kinds of problems that everyone else here have faced.