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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Village – Hacker News for people who care about their cities

Hey everyone, I started Village because I couldn't find a place online with reasonable, civil discussion about my city, Toronto. On Reddit, r/toronto could be a bit harsh and was pretty heavy with downvoting. Local blogs had comments sections that were mean and insulting. Village is an experiment. It's a place that- while honest about the challenges my city faces- tries to celebrate and share what's awesome about Toronto too. It's a place for reasonable and civil discussion. It's a place to discover awesome and interesting things in Toronto. I custom wrote the software for Village but I…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Village – Hacker News for people who care about their cities launched in 2014; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1MH

    Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  2. 2HN

    I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time. Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list. There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that. There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day. [0] "Could you share your personal blog…

    2023 · dm.hn · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Village▲208

    The AI for your social capital

    2024 · village.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A living map of indie hackers around the world

    Mar 2026 · nomaddot.verifiedtools.info · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    For the past few months, I've been working on a website that answers two different questions: - Where in my city have the best travel times to all the things and people I care about? - Given a listing, how far is it from all the things and people I care about? Personally this was fueled by my own frustrations when I was apartment hunting in NYC. I was frustrating to have to juggle so many Google Maps tabs when I was evaluating a listing, and it was also annoying to not have full confidence that I was even searching in the right places. I wanted to be close to work, a Trader Joe's, and a…

    2025 · theretowhere.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    DailyHack▲228

    A place where makers & geeks share there daily hacks

    2019 · dailyhack.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  7. 7WD

    Hey there, First time posting on Hacker News in about 2 years! The reason I’m posting is that I thought I’d write about the product I’ve been building, in hopes it resonates with people. Why build yet another social app? Because I deleted almost all social media around 3/4 years ago as it was just net negative on my life. There was very little that was truly interesting, I didn’t care about looking good to other people and because of the ‘media’ and ads, the apps were all designed to make me spend too much time for what I was getting. I hated it and what it meant for people’s behaviour,…

    2022 · oncircles.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Anonymous local interaction about the places in your city

    2014 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A community for sharing hacks

    2014 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Share your taste in media with any community

    2017 · village.fm · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN! For a while I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a community for tech bloggers to get together and share what they’re working on, so here’s my attempt at making my own. It’s a completely free website and designed to be super straightforward to use. Functionality wise it’s pretty minimalist right now, with just the ability to register accounts, post drafts, and comment on other user’s posts. Support for more features like tagging post topics, user profiles and more are coming soon! Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear any thoughts from the community. P.S. if you don’t…

    2024 · review.caleb.software · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hello HN! We're a small team in Kyoto building a website called dédédé (https://dedede.de/en) that invites people to share the various positives, negatives, oddities, etc. they find in urban spaces. The project grew out of an earlier effort where we'd built an app that assisted participatory urbanism workshops run by local nonprofits. With the new platform, we're trying to build something similar but more casual and hopefully with broader appeal, that'll be fun to use even outside of formal workshop situations. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

    2025 · dedede.de · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I used to be just a blogger. Now I build internet products, still without code, using AI, design, and taste. I was building in public on X for last 2 months. And honestly, I got tired of how it became performative and started to feel fake. I shipped 2 products. Both failed to get any real traction. I kept sneaking into popular builders’ profiles, hoping to learn how they do it. One thing I kept seeing everywhere, product launch directories. I thought here is the scope. So I started building one. Same UI like the rest. Nothing special. Suddenly one day when it was half built, I realized…

    2025 · founderswall.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14NA

    Hey HN! I wanted to know what was going on in cities/towns where my friends live, so I built Needle. It uses an LLM + Open Street map to best estimate general locations of stories posted in the past day, and pin them on the map. For stories involving multiple places, I also wanted to show the relation between them. It's still a little janky, and is limited to mostly Canadian sources of news at the moment, but I'm planning on expanding it shortly, as I'm keen to see what international sources are writing about my home city. Let me know if you have any questions/feedback!

    2025 · needle.news · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Free curated db of 101 indie hackers building in public

    2021 · its alternatives →

  16. 16AS

    Hello Hacker News! In the past few weeks I've been working on a side project that allows you to post anonymously a short message and a photo that is tied to your location. Other people can see posts around them in a radius of 1 kilometer. Posts are ephemeral and disappear after one day. That's all. It started as an exercise to try to write a geohash index and to try nodejs and Redis. I'm not sure if/how it could be useful. Maybe it could be used as a quick way of sharing something with someone next to you, or to leave a reminder for someone at a specific location. Or it could be abused…

    2015 · its alternatives →

  17. 17AH

    So this question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35198563 prompted me to revisit the framework demo'ed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35033368 Just like reddit lets you go to what might be a 404 page /r/anything-you-want and you can then create that subreddit, I added this feature to remoterenters so you can make /rr/anything-you-want and be the mod of that sub. To get the ball rolling with some content I made these two AI based subs: https://remoterenters.com/rr/amazing-ai-understanding/…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  18. 18SA

    Hey HN, A buddy and I have been working on a side project in the online community space in our free time over the past few years. Our platform is a sort of Discord/Reddit/Patreon hybrid. Decided to do a soft launch today in light of all the recent Reddit news. Community features: 1. Customizable discussion boards. Community owners can setup threaded discussion boards for different topics related to their niche. Say a user creates a community for a niche like "Cars", under that community they could create different discussion boards for sub categories like "Car-mods", "Car-photos",…

    2023 · sociables.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    This isn't your fancy new javascript gizmo, but funny guy with a funny story to promote his toddler app. I'm sure you'll agree. Humor me. 1st let me tell you how I came upon hacker news, and why I read it everyday.<p>I'm not a programmer, and only half-decent designer. I'm much more of a 'project manager' type of person. I wrote a blog post 2 years ago on how to do a fancy trick with css3 with box shadows. It was clever, and has been expanded and implemented all over the web. One day (while sitting in church) my phone kept buzzing every couple of seconds with comments on that blog…

    2012 · itunes.apple.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Ask anything about the neighbourhood

    2011 · askaround.me · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I built Campfiree because I got tired of platforms treating users as products. On Campfiree, users submit feature ideas and vote on them weekly. Moderation is handled by randomly selected community juries, no corporate team deciding what's acceptable. It's free with ads or $7/year without (free during beta). We have 55 users so far and ship features every week based on what the community votes for. I'd love honest feedback on the model and the product.

    2025 · campfiree.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Community for tech lovers and programmers

    Oct 2025 · community.techwithanirudh.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23HN

    Hacker News is a great community for all things technology. It’s the place where I spend most of my free time, always impressed by the various people I get to meet. And so, with the mandatory excuses for directing my attention to such earthly matters, I wanted to check which users are the most activ

    2020 · why.degree · its alternatives →

  24. 24CS

    I have just launched a project that has been sitting on my hard drive 80% finished for the better part of a year. http://www.chatroulettespy.com It detects your 'anonymous' chat partner's IP address and performs a geolocation lookup on it to show the user the partner's approximate location on a map. I know the Chatroulette fad has peaked a long time ago (when I started this project), but there are still many people using it and its many clones. It was important for me to follow through on this one and not let it die on my hard drive like many projects before. I would appreciate any feedback…

    2011 · chatroulettespy.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →