Meta was driving Facebook’s Nextdoor-like product called Neighborhoods before it was made available to most users. The social network started to offer it to select users in Canada back in 2020, tout it as a dedicated space where people can interact with their local community. It expanded its tests last year and deploy access for different communities across Canada and the United States. Based on a screenshot of a post written by product manager Meta and taken by a social media consultant Matt Navarrathe company will end testing Neighborhoods on October 1. It will be gone after that date.
Groups revolving around local communities are not new or rare on the site, but Neighborhood spaces have distinctive features. They allow users to create separate profiles where they can limit their public information if they don’t want the people around them to know too much about them. Users can also find groups for specific activities with a large local population through the Neighborhoods tab.
The product manager did not mention why Meta shut down Neighborhoods in their announcement. Based on TechCrunchHowever, the company said it initially invested in the project when it saw how popular Nextdoor was. However, according to the report, the best thing to do for this particular area is to allow people to form their own local communities using the site’s existing Groups feature.
Another possible explanation is that Meta is shutting down the project as part of its cost-cutting efforts. It also recently announced that it shut down indie Facebook Gaming The app could be a move to help the company survive what Mark Zuckerberg called “one of the worst recessions” [it has seen] in recent history. “
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