A social network where the person moderating actually lives here
In Sault Ste. Marie, a local news organization has quietly proposed an alternative to the dominant logic of modern social media — not by building something bigger, but by building something smaller, more deliberate, and rooted in place. Village Media's SPACES platform launches as a quiet act of civic faith: that people, given a space free from algorithmic manipulation and anonymous hostility, will choose to connect meaningfully with their neighbors. It is, at its heart, a wager that community still matters more than engagement.
- Mainstream social platforms have grown so toxic and algorithmically distorted that a local news organization felt compelled to build an entirely new alternative from scratch.
- SPACES strips away the features that fuel dysfunction — no anonymity, no engagement-chasing algorithms, no misinformation merchants hiding in plain sight.
- The platform organizes itself around what residents actually care about — gardening, sports, live music, local traditions — with real, trusted people curating each space.
- SooToday's established credibility in the community gives SPACES a foundation that most new platforms lack, but adoption remains the unresolved question.
- The platform is live, and its future now rests entirely on whether Sault Ste. Marie residents will trade passive scrolling for active, local participation.
Village Media, the organization behind SooToday, has launched SPACES — a local social network built on a premise that feels almost radical in 2024: that people deserve a digital gathering place free from trolls, algorithmic manipulation, and misinformation. The platform is designed specifically for Sault Ste. Marie residents, organized around the things they actually care about — gardening, sports, hunting, live music, local hobbies — with each space curated by someone with genuine expertise and overseen by a news source the community already trusts.
What separates SPACES from a standard Facebook group is its intentional architecture. There are no anonymous accounts, no mysterious ranking systems rewarding outrage, and no Silicon Valley incentives optimizing for ad revenue. The people shaping the platform are the same people who live here — and the moderator of the gardening forum might be someone you've passed in the grocery store.
The harder question is whether residents will actually show up. Switching from familiar, if flawed, platforms to something smaller and more participatory is a genuine ask. But if SPACES finds its footing, it could offer a quiet blueprint for how local journalism helps communities reclaim their own digital lives — one neighborhood conversation at a time.
Village Media, the news organization behind SooToday, has spent years building something that feels almost quaint in 2024: a social network where people actually know each other, where the algorithm doesn't decide what you see, and where anonymity isn't a shield for cruelty.
The platform is called SPACES, and it launches with a simple premise—that Facebook and Twitter have become so toxic, so algorithmically warped, so flooded with misinformation and bad-faith actors, that there's room for something different. Something local. Something small enough that the person moderating a gardening forum might be someone you've seen at the grocery store.
The idea came from Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie and his team, who recognized that Sault Ste. Marie residents were hungry for a way to connect over shared interests without the noise. SPACES organizes itself around what people actually care about: gardening, sports, hunting, live music, hobbies, local traditions. Each space is curated by someone with real expertise in that area, and each one is overseen by SooToday—a news source locals already know and trust. That's the whole architecture. No mysterious algorithm deciding what rises to the top. No anonymous accounts spreading rumors. No engagement metrics designed to keep you scrolling at 2 a.m.
What makes this different from just another Facebook group is the intentionality. The platform was built from the ground up to be civil. To be safe. To be entirely community-powered, meaning the people who live here are the ones shaping it, not a Silicon Valley company optimizing for ad revenue. The trolls and the misinformation merchants have nowhere to hide because there's no anonymity to hide behind, and there's no algorithm rewarding outrage.
The real test now is whether people will actually use it. Sault Ste. Marie residents have spent years on platforms that work fine for staying in touch with distant friends, even if those platforms have become increasingly unpleasant. Switching to something new, something smaller, something that requires actual community participation rather than passive scrolling—that's a different ask. But if SPACES gains traction, it could become a model for how local news organizations help their communities reclaim digital space from the platforms that have come to dominate it. The platform is live now, waiting to see if the people it was built for will show up.
Notable Quotes
The mission of SPACES is to bring back genuine engagement between real people living in the same corner of the world— Village Media/SooToday
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why did it take years to build this? Couldn't you just set up a Facebook group?
A Facebook group is someone else's platform. They own the rules, the data, the experience. We wanted to own ours—to build something that reflected what Sault Ste. Marie actually needs, not what Meta's algorithm thinks we should see.
What stops someone from just being cruel on SPACES the way they are everywhere else?
Anonymity is gone. Real names, real accountability. And the spaces themselves are curated by people who know the community. A gardening expert isn't going to tolerate someone using the gardening space to spread conspiracy theories.
But won't people just stay on Facebook because that's where everyone is?
Maybe some will. But we're betting that people are tired of the noise. That they'd rather have a smaller, real conversation with their neighbors than a huge feed full of strangers and ads.
Who decides what counts as civil? Isn't that subjective?
It is. That's why we have local curators—people who understand the community's values. It's not a algorithm. It's judgment.
What happens if SPACES grows beyond Sault Ste. Marie?
That's the question. Right now it's built for one place. Whether it scales, whether other communities want their own version—that's what comes next.