Nearest first if you have shared your location, then a simple score, then a daily shuffle. That is the whole ordering.
The score has only four inputs, and none of them is popularity or money: whether the profile is live and complete, whether it is inside its first 60 days, whether it has been kept up to date, and whether it has gone stale.
The feed also deliberately shows two People for every one Place. If you have not shared your location, distance plays no part at all and the order falls through to score and the daily shuffle.
No. There is nothing to buy. Localsville has no advertising, no sponsored placement, no boosts and no featured slots, and no amount of money moves anyone ahead of anyone else.
This is enforced in the code rather than only promised in copy: the ranking refuses paid input, and a profile's score cannot be set by anyone — it is recomputed from the permitted inputs on every save.
It is also what the rest of the site says: paying more never moves a Person or Place ahead of someone else.
Yes — a free 60-day head start. When a profile first goes live it carries extra weight in the ordering for its first sixty days, so a new neighbour is not invisible next to someone who has been here a year.
It is automatic, it is the same for everyone, and it cannot be bought, renewed or extended.
Search ranks by how well the words match — a profile's own text counts most, then the words in its offerings, then a looser match on names.
There is also an optional smarter search that understands meaning rather than exact words. It only ever reaches a profile whose owner separately agreed to it.
Deliberately rough. You see a phrase like "About 2 mi away", never a precise figure and never a point on a map.
For a Person, the location behind that label is stored already blurred — snapped to a grid roughly 275 metres across — so the exact spot is never held in the first place.
Under a tenth of a mile it simply says "Less than 0.1 mi away".
Never for a Person. A Person profile cannot hold a street address at all — the server refuses to store one.
A Place can publish a street address, but only when two separate things are true: the address has been confirmed, and the owner has turned on the public-address setting. Otherwise nothing is returned.
A Place appears on the map only under those same conditions.
Almost always because Localsville has not reached your community yet. Discover is scoped to one community, and a community with no neighbours in it looks empty — that is honest rather than broken.
Localsville is starting on Oʻahu and building out community by community. You can browse another community to see what a busier one looks like.
A profile only appears once it is live, complete, and its owner's account is active.
Explore is a set of ready-made ways to look around your community — new around you, neighbours who can help, neighbours making things, local places to visit, and what is available for pickup.
The collections are rules, not editorial picks. Nobody chooses who appears in them and nobody can buy a place in one.
People-first, and it is built into the code rather than only stated in copy. Discover shows two People for every one Place, and the ordering refuses every commercial and popularity signal.
In practice that means: discovery comes before transacting, a person comes before their listing, and visibility is earned by being here and keeping your profile real — never purchased.
