Are there as many odd people on your local FB group as on mine?

[Anothernamechangeee]

I swear it seems like quite a normal town but then you go on the FB page and it’s full of weirdos

Today it has all kicked off because the tap water tastes funny in the area. Loads of comments about how tap water is toxic, you should only drink bottled water, it’s all contaminated etc etc

Weird mix of posts about dog poo, local electricians, then some vaguely racist jokes (“you can’t have a laugh these days”)

Last year it all kicked off because someone spent ages knitting scarves for trees and then there was some appreciation but some people saying how weird it was and they didn’t like it at all

It’s just all so very odd. People are odd.

I don't find ours odd enough, tbh. I do realise that this means that I'm the village odd person.

Ours is fairly sane, factual and dull, unless anybody posts the latest outrage committed by the two village ASBO families. The comments then turn into a massive charge sheet of all their historical crimes, of which there are many. All without mentioning names, although the one I started I had to pull because people started mentioning hanging being too good for 'em. The worst family lives 2 doors down from me, and unbelievably it seems they have finally- FINALLY moved out, to go and bestow their lovely selves on another village. I should mention that on Facebook, actually- we should probably have some kind of mass celebration.

Oh you have to join them. They're hilarious.

I think you have just summarised why "normal" people wouldn't want to join one. Imagine a "deluge" of all that tat clogging up your inbox all the bloody time? Basically these groups are for the lonely and the meddlers.

My local Facebook group consists of posts about dog shit, bins, parking, one dog that keeps getting out and intimidating people and the police do fuck all, parcels delivered to the wrong house and the odd person trying to sell wax melts or cupcakes.

There's a cat in my garden
This bush is overgrown and you can't walk past
Who is letting off fireworks?
What's (main road) like this morning?
This car has been parked here (perfectly legally) for three days now, who owns it?

Complaints about any new houses or businesses.

Selling is only allowed on Sundays 🤷🏼‍♀️

My favourite is chuckling at the admins getting so cross about pointless rules being broken and frequently banning people.

Oh and cats. So many cats going about their daily lives and getting kidnapped and taken to the vets to be scanned for a chip. Mental.

No kids. Never use GP surgery (& it's not local anyway). Bin details on council website. Anything else we need to know we can look up or - in extreme emergency - knock on a neighbour's door and ask (I know.... shock horror!). In over 30 years of living in the same place (ie pre FB) I have never once felt the need or lack of such a site.

Imagine a "deluge" of all that tat clogging up your inbox all the bloody time?

I think that scenario exists in your imagination only.

I dip in as and when I feel like it. Absolutely nothing goes into my inbox, ever.

Not FB, but my local ND is insane. This happened in winter 2021:

A guy posted about a 'Dodgy looking young man' who'd been 'Loitering in the early hours' outside his house, just around the corner from me. That was all the post said.

Eventually, after much coaxing, he put a stupidly vague written description.

Replies to the description were a mixed bag of in/sane comments but a few asked for more details, maybe a picture.

A week or so later and after much excruciating technical advice about how to attach a video, the guy posted a short clip he'd got from his neighbour's CCTV. The replies were, again, a mixed bag with some people agreeing that the 'Dodgy looking young man' was, indeed' very 'Dodgy looking'.

The 'Dodgy looking young man' turned out to be..... My fucking husband 😂

He wasn't 'Loitering', just walking our very very slow, elderly dog which entails a lot more standing around than actually moving. And it wasn't the 'Early hours', it was 6am which is when the dog gets up for an immediate, emergency poo.

Ours is mainly pretty tame (warnings of road works, lost cats, requests for recommendations for local plumbers etc). But every so often there is a rant about some (actual or perceived) anti-social behaviour in the village. Whether this is children playing too loudly or a break in at someone's home it usually takes about 5 posts before someone declares that 'It was never like this before the New Houses', which will start several pages of posts indicating that the New Houses have turned the village in to some sort of lawless no-go zone.

The New Houses are nearly 40 years old. I live in one, and my neighbours are all mild mannered older people.

My favourite FaceBook group is one where people post historical photographs of the town. It then fills up with comments like, the village is not as good as it was 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago. What many of the posters seem to miss, especially in relation to the older pictures, is the obvious poverty. Kids with worn out shoes and hand me down clothes which have clearly seen better days. Not to mention the unsurfaced roads and pavements ankle deep in mud. They really seem to think that it's the, "land of lost content", to quote A E Houseman.

If you had to drink our tap water (West Yorkshire), which seems to be fifty percent chlorine you might not be so disparaging!

Our village Facebook pages are a source of great amusement.
Lots of interesting old photos (that's our Maud - your great Aunty Susie- at the works do in 1952 sort of thing), local info about the local clubs and events- all good.

Then the nutters. Photos of dog poo, litter, random cars that overtook the poster in the wrong place, lost dogs/cats, found dogs/cats.
Kids playing knock down Ginger, kids hanging around the shops.

And the local vendetta. One man has got it in for a person who has moved into the local sheltered bungalows. He follows him and takes photos then is all surprised when it gets nasty.
The village is taking sides- I'm keeping well out of it!

We also get quite a lot of misplaced cat panic. "My cat's been missing for three hours." .... And then the update" Oh no hang on here it is in the garden"

A friend of mine did this on NextDoor. Her cat usually never usually goes further than her garden but one day the cat was nowhere to be seen. She posted after the cat'd been missing for 20 minutes 😅

Her logic was that the sooner she posted it, the more likely the cat was to be closer to home.

She found the cat about 10 minutes later fast asleep in an empty plant pot. She at least had the good grace to wait until the next day to post to ND that the cat had "returned" home.

Mine is dull as anything, just people who drive everywhere complaining about the traffic and congestion which they themselves are creating. I’d like a bit of a toxic water conspiracy theory to liven things up!

Ours is a bit bonkers at times. Best thread ever was a local woman complaining that the sun was in her eyes driving up a certain road and had anyone else noticed and what should be done about it?

It was hilarious 🤣

My mother-in-law followed us to our small town.

I look on aghast as she obliviously bickers with my friends on our local Facebook group about things she has no idea about, as she's hardly lived here for any time.

Ours is ok but we have a person who posts odd things. He starts off in the middle of a sentence and is quite meandering (20 plus paragraphs) and you don't know where it's going until the end when he clarifies it was about there being more buses 10 years ago or he saw a piece of litter. No one will reply because it's long and meandering (and boring) so about 20 minutes later he posts another (long and boring) post about how no one wants to listen to men in their 40s and he should just delete Facebook and never bother posting again and everyone is ungrateful for not thanking him for telling them where the piece of litter is or informing them about bus history and he might as well move away forever. Then he comes back the next day.

On the whole I found the local group helpful. I went to stay with my mum when she was ill and my SIL suggested I join the local face book page. It was certainly helpful for asking advice of local tradespersons and when mum died I asked if anyone involved with puppies would like mum's leftover bed pads.

I no longer live there but always like to read it. Mostly lost/found cats and dogs or what was the loud bang at 3am type stuff.

Haven't yet read anything strange but a woman had an issue with me once. There was talk of hornets and she said she had some in her garden and they did not bother her. I jokingly said are you mad?? She took umbrage at that!

Ah, yes, ours frequently descends in to a competition as to who has lived there the longest (you’ve no chance if you’re under 60 or born elsewhere) or a slanging match between the old and new houses.

Do you...not know how facebook works?

There wouldn't be any deluge. Nothing would go to your 'inbox' (I'm assuming you mean your email?) to clog it up unless you specifically set all your notifications to do so which would have to be a deliberate action.

Why would you comment on something you clearly don't understand?

Also obviously not all that stuff is on the group all the time. That's what 'example' means rather than 'exhaustive list.'

but why knock on one neighbour's door and hope they might have the information, when they would likely not know any more than you, when you can ask 1000 people at the same time, thus greatly increasing the odds that someone might know it?

I don't think anyone's said that a neighbourhood group is the only way to get information, just that it's an easy, free, and quick way to do so.

Again, nobody is saying you have to use it if you don't want to. Congratulations for living a neighbourhood group free life and your superior googling and social interaction skills, even if the down side is you're the sort of dick that thinks if you don't see value in something, it is objectively and conclusively of no value to anyone else.

I came off FB as what I thought was going to be a pleasant conversation with neighbours turned into a toxic discussion day after day & honestly I have zero tolerance for people that want to talk nasty about each others or spy on them. Shame as I expect there are some lovely people who want to talk

We have a separate argument board. The last time I looked someone took a photo of a badly parked car without blanking the number plate.
We also have a man who owns quite a few businesses in town and he decided to put a mural on his wall to do with a local footballer. It went down like a lead balloon.