General Discussion

12044 readers

4 users here now

Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.

🪆 About Lemmy World

🧭 Finding Communities

Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!

💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:

[email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
[email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
[email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
[email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
[email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!

Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.

0. See: Rules for Users.

No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
No Ads/Spamming.
No NSFW content.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Jessica

ElectroVagrant

fubo

Thinkin' about so-called third places (self.general)

submitted 1 year ago by ElectroVagrant to c/general

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You may have heard of third places before, but in case it's new to you, they're essentially community spaces where you can chill & socialize...Like here, I suppose! But typically they refer to in-person community spaces.

Does your area of the world still have a number of these, or are they in the decline? Do you know if your in-person communities are trying to establish or renovate theirs to help people connect or reconnect with one another?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This has been a real problem around me, and it was getting worse before the pandemic. I have barely tried since, but as we are getting back to in-person events it will keep taunting me. I'm in the Boston MA USA area.

We have some spaces, like library rooms. But they often have constraints. One was that you had to be a tax-ID non-profit. It turns out we are for one of the groups I organize, but not all of them. So many of the more informal types are out of luck.

If you did qualify for the library room and get approved, you can't have food. Or you can--but you have to use the library catering. This was like $200 for a dozen brownies.

And also: if you do make the cut, you cannot use it for regular meetings. So people can't get used to going to the library on the third Thursday...or whatever.

There was a time when you could get a restaurant room, if you would spend some amount of money. But my groups have been full of people who don't spend like that, or don't drink like a sportsball crowd. So they start saying that you can't take up that space anymore. And I get that--running a restaurant is hard and margins are thin. I don't blame them. But we also don't want to force people to buy an $8 beer.

There are some "community rooms" around. It's very hard to figure out who has them, how to use them, and schedule them. And someone has to show up with the key. This failed for our neighborhood group several times.

I don't know how to solve this in a place where real estate is high and there just aren't rooms sitting around. I also think liability and cleaning weigh on this.

I don't know how to solve this.

[–] ElectroVagrant 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t know how to solve this in a place where real estate is high and there just aren’t rooms sitting around. I also think liability and cleaning weigh on this.

I don’t know how to solve this.

It may not be much, but if it makes you feel any better, this isn't the sort of thing for any one person to really address. It's definitely more of a community effort to recognize the necessity for more lax, non-productive spaces (which may have productive spaces to visit on the peripheries).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I know. But I'm the one that has to call all over the place to try to book a room. It's so depressing.

I will say, though, that I have seen an interesting attempt locally to do this better. It doesn't meet my needs for location and features, but it is a nice effort.

https://culturehouse.cc/