Short version: it’s a place to put local things, run by the folks who live here. No ads, no feed deciding what you see, nothing sold to anybody. Two minutes and you’ll know the whole thing.
Seven counties in south-central Kentucky: Warren, Allen, Barren, Butler, Logan, Edmonson and Simpson — plus the towns just over those lines, because a county line never stopped anybody going to a ball game.
We didn’t coin it. Weather or Not BG did, and they’ve spent years making it mean something around here. They’re friends of ours and they’re the weather. We’re the gathering. Same seven counties, different job.
Type your email. We send you a link. Tap it and you’re in. There’s no password to forget and nothing to install — the link works even if you open your email on a different phone than the one you asked from.
Then you pick a handle. That’s your name around here, and your page lives at fairlyconnected.com/p/your-handle. First come, first served.
Everybody gets one. It’s yours — your colors, your banner, your face, and whatever sections you want on it: what you’re up to right now, who you are, where to find you, pictures, a video. A shop or a church or a band gets one too, with hours and an address.
Nobody sees it until you flip the switch at the bottom. You can flip it back off whenever you like.
Found something worth a neighbor’s time? Hand it in. Paste the link, say your piece in a line, and pick which kind of thing it is:
Local rules the ranking, but anything counts — plenty of what matters here started somewhere else.
A person reads every one. Not a filter, not a score — a person with a name who lives here. They decide what goes on the front page and when.
We use AI to draft the headline and pull the picture off the page, because typing headlines all day is how a thing like this dies. A person fixes it and approves it before anybody sees it, and we say so on the page. AI writes the house copy here. It never writes as you, and it never writes as a neighbor.
What you said stays exactly what you said. Your line goes up in quotes with your handle under it, word for word. Nobody at this end can edit it — not us, not an admin. The database won’t allow it.
Every page can have a wall. Leave a note, say hey, say thanks for the tractor. A person gives it a look before it goes up — usually within the hour — and whoever owns the page can take anything down, no questions asked.
Nobody can edit what you wrote. Not the page’s owner, not us. It goes up in your words or it doesn’t go up.
A letter goes to one person, and it doesn’t arrive today.
You write it, and a rider out of your own neighborhood picks it up. It lands with the morning post the next day, and while it’s out you can watch it cross the map.
Some letters run late. On purpose. A letter that might not make it on time is what made a letter worth getting. When yours runs late, the carrier says why, and it says so on the postmark from the moment it’s picked up. Never on a first letter between two people — that one always makes it.
Anything with a deadline goes the fast way, and you decide that, not us: there’s a “this one can’t wait” switch, and a letter to a business always goes fast. A question about feed shouldn’t sit on a horse overnight.
No typing dots. No chat. No DMs. One hop a day, and that’s the whole idea.
Nothing reads your letters. No AI drafts them, flags them, sorts them or summarizes them. There is nowhere in this system for a machine to put an opinion about your mail, and that’s on purpose — we wrote it into the database so a future version of us can’t quietly change its mind. The details are here, in plain English.
Get a letter worth keeping? You can stick it on your page, the way a drawing goes on a fridge door. You ask; the person who wrote it says yes; then it goes up. Both of you, or it stays between you. Either one can take it back down later, and the letter itself survives.
If a picture rode along with the letter, it stays between the two of you. One yes shouldn’t cover the words and a photograph.
Block somebody and new letters, wall notes and fridge asks stop in both directions, whichever one of you closed the door.
A gathering is a time to be somewhere together. We lay the first ones ourselves, because we want to hear what this place needs and what would make the site feel like yours. Once we’ve learned from a few, neighbors will be able to lay their own.
It gets laid days before it burns, so you can see it coming, say you’ll be there, and watch who else is coming. That’s half the point — looking forward to a thing is the good part, and everything else out there took that away.
When it lights, you pull up a chair. If there’s a video it plays right there on the page. When it’s out, it’s out, and the names of who came stay with it. The bigger ones we’ll call bonfires: room for the real talk about how this place should work.
There’s no talking on the page yet. A room full of people needs a way to say “not from this person,” and we haven’t built that, so we haven’t built the talking either. For now a gathering is somewhere to be: a time, a topic, and whoever else turned up.
A supper, a show, a yard sale, a workday, a meeting — if folks can turn up to it, it belongs on the calendar, and anybody can put one there. A person reads it before it goes on. Times are WABBLES time, whatever your phone thinks.
Folks and places is the whole directory — every neighbor, shop, church, band and club with a page here, and a box to look somebody up by name, town or trade. Nobody gets listed without putting themselves there.
Nothing. There are no ads and there never will be. When this grows, local merchants can sponsor a day — said out loud, on the page, so you know. That’s the whole business model.
One thing at a time, in that order. Slow your scroll.
Still got a question? Ask a person. And here’s what we collect and why, in plain English.