Around: places, posts and people

Around inverts the usual arrangement. You do not build a following, you walk into a place: the local government you live in, the estate behind your gate, the campus you study on. What people there are saying today is the feed.

It exists for the questions a Nigerian day is actually governed by. Is there light in Gwarinpa. Is the road at Ikorodu passable this morning. Has the tanker come. Those are worth opening the app for on a day you are not booking anything.

Nigeria is here as 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, and all 774 local governments behind them. Every one of those is a door: a place that either already has people in it, or is waiting for the first person to open it.

A place can also sit inside a local government rather than being one. Lekki Phase 1 inside Eti-Osa, a university inside Lagos Mainland. Those are proposed by people who live there and reviewed before they open.

Every place is one of four kinds, and the kind changes nothing but the label:

• City. A whole city, like Abuja.
• Area. A neighbourhood people name in conversation, like Yaba or Gwagwalada.
• Estate. One gated estate, where the gate and the generator are shared.
• Campus. A university or polytechnic and the streets around it.

Open the directory, find your state, then your local government, and join. You can be in as many places as you actually have something to do with, and leave any of them at any time.

If the place you want has nobody in it yet, you open it. That writes the first entries and you are standing in it. If what you want is smaller than a local government, propose it from the new place screen and a person reviews it.

Reading does not need an account. Signed out, or signed in with nothing joined yet, the feed shows the busiest open places under a line saying plainly that these are not yours yet, and one control that goes and picks them.

Two things you can write, and the difference is what you want back:

• Say something. Anything worth knowing about the place.
• Ask a question. Something you want an answer to. People who know the area see it.

Up to 2,000 characters and up to 4 pictures. Pictures are resized on your phone before they are uploaded, so posting on a slow connection is not a punishment. You have 15 minutes to fix a post after you write it, and you can take your own post down whenever you like.

People reply, mark what is useful, and repost into the places they are in. Replies are one level deep on purpose, so a thread stays readable on a phone.

A story is a longer piece with a picture, a headline and a standfirst: a place written about rather than a line said in passing. It is not ephemeral. Nothing counts down twenty-four hours and nothing expires it, because the whole point is that it is still there next month when the next person is deciding whether to move to that street. Stories carry their own comments and their own likes.

When an agent publishes a property, it is announced once in the place it is actually in, and once only. A finished stay by a verified agent speaks there too. That is how a room stays alive without anybody inventing anything: the real activity of the platform surfaces where it happened.

A place can have moderators, who are members of that place and not Vallo staff. The word administrator is deliberately not used for them anywhere you can see it, because they are not one.

A moderator can:

• Hide a post while a person reviews it
• Welcome people and answer questions about the place
• Flag a listing or a profile to the Vallo team

A moderator cannot:

• Delete anybody's post, ever
• Remove a member from the place
• See anyone's bookings, wallet or messages

You can apply to moderate a place you are in, and withdraw the application at any time.

You can follow somebody whose posts you find useful, and they can follow you. You can block or mute an account, and you can report a post or a profile. What you see is a place first and people second, which is the opposite of how most of this works elsewhere and is the reason Around is worth having.