Meutch had a great June, with more people using the platform than ever. More activity is making Meutch more fun for me to use! Here are a few of my personal highlights from last month.
Borrowing: I have this electric leaf shredder. Its blade broke 3 years ago and it’s been useless. I ordered a replacement set but when I went to finally perform the fix, I couldn’t loosen the bolt securing the blades. I contacted support and they told me I just needed to use more force – but I couldn’t get enough torque with my ratcheting socket wrench. So I posted a Meutch request to borrow a breaker bar. My friend Jonathan dropped his off on his way to church and I had the bolt loose in seconds. The rest of my repair was easy and I promptly shredded some leaves to use as mulch in my raised beds!
Lending: I gave away some seeds for a little free library and a spirograph toy. A couple of moms in my neighborhood showed up to pick them up, with kids in tow; I was sitting on my front porch and got to hear about their projects. It was delightful how Meutch led to chats with neighbors I’d never met before.
Our family also lent out our backpacking packs. They went to Nordhouse Dunes for Juneteenth weekend, came home, and are now heading to Canada!
By the numbers: it was our biggest month yet, with 56 users taking an action on the site. That means I have made a charitable donation of $56, this month to All Hands Active, the hackerspace/makerspace community in downtown Ann Arbor.
Features: Meutch gained new features in June including regional circles. These are designated by a site administrator (me, for now) and if a new user registers and their location is inside that circles radius, it is recommended to them as the main circle to join. I made a regional Ypsilanti circle, in addition to designating a regional Ann Arbor circle.
One nice feature came from a new contributor: thanks to @terhorst, one’s own activities now show in the home feed by default, though you can filter them out. He is also almost done with a feature to let users reply to messages directly via email.
Lastly, I added official terms and conditions and a privacy policy. So far everyone on the site has behaved themselves well but that won’t last forever if the service keeps growing. This starts to get ahead of that by explicitly stating expectations for conduct.
Room for improvement: there are two major related features I want to work on soon. I want to give users the ability to reply to a request by offering an item – multiple people have requested this. And I’d like users to be able to control which circles an item of theirs is visible to.
These would go hand in hand; you could mark an item visible to no circles at all, if you wanted, but use the share link to give only the requester access. That would allow people to lend valuable items that they might not feel comfortable making available to everyone on Meutch.
Thanks to everyone who has used Meutch, keep spreading the word! It feels like we’re nearing a self-sustaining level of activity.
