The Basics

What is Neighbourhoods?

Neighbourhoods is a project building web3 native tools and services that enable online communities to do more together. Neighbourhoods makes it easy to bundle together different social coordination (or "groupware") modules and to pair these with tags, reactions, ratings, and reputation systems chosen to fit your group’s culture and purpose.

How will I be able to use neighbourhoods?

Imagine taking your average Discord server to the next level: You can add apps into your social space and customize everything from algorithms, to reactions, to visual skins.

Neighbourhoods takes a 'group first' approach. Our tools are meant to provide a complete, ultra-configurable community hub. Still, there's no need to compromise individual data autonomy! Your activity conforms to group rules, but personal records are also stored locally, allowing you to take your social data with you wherever you go.

Why do we need decentralized social coordination platforms?

The distributed web offers users greater autonomy and control over their data. Supporting multiple reputation systems helps prevent centralized control and mitigates the potential harm that reputation systems can inflict on individuals.

With our Community Activation Wizard, groups have the power to shape their own algorithms and data sharing protocols. This means they can determine how information is processed and prioritize specific aspects.

These versatile tools cater to different cultures, enabling seamless transitions from group chats to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). By fostering collective experimentation and evolution, they serve as incubators for group growth and innovation.

What is the relationship between Neighbourhoods and Holochain?

The concept of Neighbourhoods emerged from a weekly discussion series involving Holochain and other members of the peer-to-peer ecosystem as a response to the extractive practices of social apps in Web2. Neighbourhoods required an ultra-scalable distributed ledger capable of preserving the dynamism of Web2. Holochain's uniform data formatting simplifies the translation of reputation metrics across social spaces and facilitates data portability. Additionally, Holochain's trust-but-verify model for data integrity, along with its agent/group duality, align perfectly with Neighbourhoods' social ontology and commitment to safeguarding and persisting data.

From a technical standpoint, each neighbourhood is comprised of a set of miniature Holochain apps (or 'applets') that streamline compatibility with Neighbourhoods' Social Sensemaker API.

I am a Developer. How do I get started?

If you want to start developing your own Neighbourhoods Applets or experiment with our framework, the best place to start is our GitHub repositories:

• Neighbourhoods Launcher: the starting point for launching Neighbourhoods and for starting real communities or testing NH Applets;

• Scaffolding Applet Template: a great starting point for creating a brand new Applet from scratch;

• Todo Applet: the most complete and up-to-date NH Applet example, with commented code to get you started on more advanced projects;

• Or just explore our GitHub organization to find more cool stuff to get you inspired such as new Applets under development, design templates and styles and the inner workings of the Social Sensemaker.