A companion, not a replacement.

This is a permanent, searchable record of the answers a neighbourhood keeps re-asking — pediatricians, daycares, sitters, plumbers, school-zone facts. It sits alongside the Facebook groups that already exist. Nobody has to move and nothing has to change.

What it will never do

• No algorithmic rankingNothing here is ordered by what a machine thinks you want. Feeds and search results sort by rules you pick and can predict.
• No recommendationsNo suggested people, no suggested groups, no “you may also like”.
• Nothing written about you by usNo generated summaries, no scores, no characterisations of a person, a landlord or a building.
• Nothing disappearsEvery version of every page is kept, and any group can export its own record at any time — take the Greenpoint archive now, no account, no asking. A promise you have to request is not a promise.

Why

Baby Hui, Fort Greene Babies, BushRidge Parents and Bushwick Moms were all Yahoo Groups until Yahoo shut the service down in December 2020 with no migration path. Roughly fifteen years of accumulated recommendations vanished overnight. Park Slope Parents’ public directory still links to the dead URLs.

These communities have already lost their record once. The point of this archive is that it cannot happen the same way twice.