Once one Lead gets in, only they themselves can promote another person to Lead. In my neighborhood, we had one thoughtful Lead, and one insane Lead. The thoughtful lead carefully deliberated about adding more Leads, while the insane Lead picked her cronies - and then eventually "overthrew" the thoughtful Lead.
NextDoor has terrible content moderation and no penalties for infringing users. It's absolutely vile, amplifying the most minority of opinions with no consequences.
No such alternative exists on NextDoor. Don't like the content or moderators? Your only choice is stop participating. I have no idea why NextDoor thinks that is good for their business model. Over time the site will just be populated with Karens.
The cynic in me thinks that Nextdoor is just proof that the fundamental thing that makes social media terrible - being a megaphone for egos, pettiness, and narcism - are not overcome by real identities and scope. In my group, there are people that like to stir the pot, and then there are people that love reacting to the stir.
I'll admit it was awful when I lived in Berkeley, but so were the people around me.
Nextdoor is great; lets me know what the neighbors are doing and helps me pick out great local services. Some dudes above pointed out you need some common interest for it to work: being a good neighbor counts as a common interest!
The reason it worked, was that you would gather based on your interests and there was no giant company optimizing things for clicks - that is also why the original reddit worked so well: there is a small space for your niche.
If this were interpreted by a court or regulator (perhaps as part of an EU anti-trust investigation) as a requirement to have new data automatically exported on an on-going basis, then that is very similar to requiring effectively federation between big services.
They could do whatever they wanted with their customers (pricing, who and how to serve, terms of service, etc.) when they were small enough that users could in practice leave them for a competitor just as easily as they could cut off service.
But if they allowed themselves to grow to into the millions of users, they would have to gradually transition to purely uninvolved, invisible infrastructure, like an underground water pipe. Their users would deal with smaller middlemen instead of the background infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider would have no way to impose terms of service or philosophical opinions or pricing controls or whatever, which only the middlemen would be allowed, and if the middlemen all conspire, the infrastructure provider wouldn't be able to deny service to a new middleman who offered an alternative.
Basically, the small players deal freely with small players, and the biggest players, instead of gaining leverage, would have to serve them more and control or compete less (or remain small and retain the full freedom of a small player).
Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.
The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.
Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist.
"15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have.
It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.
1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage.
2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time?
3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.
Talking face to face with friends and family
It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.
Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?