NextDoor
- Run by a corporation in San Francisco
- Revenue from ads and sponsored posts
- Your data is the product
- Same rules for every neighborhood
- Feeds tuned for engagement, not usefulness
How NeighborShed works
NeighborShed is free, open-source software for sharing tools with your neighbors. There is no corporation behind it — just a neighbor who set it up for your community.
Who runs this?
A person in your neighborhood. This instance is hosted by a community member in Vacaville, CA. They pay the hosting costs, keep the lights on, and are reachable if something breaks.
There is no company collecting your data, selling ads, or deciding what your neighborhood should look like. The person running this is your neighbor.
How is this different from NextDoor?
NeighborShed
- Run by a neighbor in your community
- No ads, no data mining, no feed algorithm
- Your data stays on this instance
- Your community sets its own norms
- Built for one thing: sharing tools
What does it cost?
Nothing. NeighborShed is free to use. The person hosting this instance covers the small server costs because they believe neighbors sharing tools is worth it.
If you find it useful and want to help keep it running, you can chip in — but it is never required.
Want this for your neighborhood?
NeighborShed is open-source software. If you want to bring tool sharing to your own community, you can run your own instance. You do not need permission. Every neighborhood deserves its own leader — not a platform that speaks for all of them.
You will need someone with basic technical skills to set it up, but the idea is simple: one person in the neighborhood who cares enough to get it going. That person is the host, not a corporation.
The model
Software
Open source. Free to use, free to modify, free to run your own.
Hosting
Each community instance is run independently by a local host. No central server owns all the data.
Governance
Your community, your norms. The host is accountable to the neighborhood, not to investors.