Mixed signals: Nextdoor villains and the holiday you've never heard of

The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front. Endless Thread producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan bring two stories to remind us that the internet is a morass of information that no one can ever control. Show notes: "How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/the-villain-of-el-cerrito-nextdoor/" (Oakland Review of Books) Bomellida FAQ https://bomellida.github.io/faq (GitHub) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode looks at what the rise of the gig economy means for workers, businesses, and the future of work. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters, so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich, together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory.

• 1:22Amory Sivertson?

  Benny B. Johnson.

• 1:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  We've got a special treat today, a producer-led episode.

• 1:28Amory Sivertson?

  Orchestra's out of the pit?

• 1:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  The sailors are steering the ship.

• 1:33Amory Sivertson?

  Love a producer takeover.

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, so get ready for that. But first, we are working on an episode that we want to get your help with.

• 1:41Amory Sivertson?

  We want to do some international travel, some memetic international travel.

• 1:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, I was sending a song around that I found on Reddit the other day. It's a German song that was like, "I'm sick of my boss. All I want is bass."

• 2:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  And that got us thinking. We'd love to know more about memes outside of the American meme bubble.

• 2:09Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, and we need your help for this, obviously. So, do you have a favorite meme from a country or a culture outside of the US? We know you guys are cosmopolitan with your memes, and some of you are just listening outside of the US. You're in Japan, you're in Ireland, New Zealand, the Netherlands. We know you're out there, so what do you got?

• 2:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Please send your favorite international memes and why you love them to [email protected].

• 2:37Amory Sivertson?

  And in the meantime, we're going to hand it off to producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan. Here's the show.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  Frannie Monahan, fellow producer of Endless Thread. Grace Tatter, fellow producer of Endless Thread. Today is another producer takeover. I'm so excited to do one of these. Yes.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  So, Frannie, I have a story for you that's about a woman named Amy Brown. She recently wrote an essay for the Oakland Review of Books.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  About a time that she sent some mixed signals. And her essay starts like this.

• 3:28Speaker 05

  In April 2026, my husband and I bought our first home in El Cerrito, California. By the end of June, I'd become public enemy number one on the local Nextdoor. This is my story.

• 3:40Speaker 06

  Oh, my God.

• 3:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 06

  This sounds like the intro of a true crime podcast. Okay, so, Frannie, before we get into the crime of it all, are you familiar with Nextdoor?

• 3:55Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. I am a recent homeowner myself, and I love Nextdoor. I don't ever post on Nextdoor. I'm a big Nextdoor lurker, though.

• 4:04Speaker 06

  Same. I am also a lurker. But for people who don't know, Nextdoor is a hyper-local social media platform, and you have to verify that you actually live in the neighborhood that you're joining. You have to use your real name, and it's a place where you can share recommendations and local news. It can also be a forum to discuss local politics, which is where Amy's troubles began.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  When we moved to El Cerrito and I joined the El Cerrito Nextdoor, I realized that El Cerrito was in the middle of, kind of like on the ongoing political battle, which I sort of stepped right into the middle of.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  El Cerrito is a small town in the Bay Area, right across from San Francisco. Amy is a writer with a background in social media, which we will come back to, and she never expected to be able to afford a house in El Cerrito. But when a tech company she worked for went public, she and her husband could actually afford a down payment on a house there. Here's the political battle that's going on as Amy settles into her new home. It's about a proposal for a tax to build a new state-of-the-art library.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  It is something that comes out to like a couple hundred bucks a year. And I'm thinking, that sounds great, right? Like, I would love for my tax dollars to go to a library. That is something we actively use. I've got small children. I like to read. So, yeah, to me, it seemed like kind of a no-brainer. But then also, driving around town, I saw a lot of signs that said, "Library tax, a bad deal for El Cerrito." And I was like, what are those about?

• 5:37Speaker 06

  Okay, I mean, I'm on her side here. I'm like, I'm all for libraries. What?

• 5:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's how Amy feels. What? And she starts to make some assumptions about who is opposing this new library. It is an unspoken truth of municipal politics that a lot of the people who have time to participate in these things and go to council meetings and be very active, might be retired, on the older end of things. And it very much seemed on Nextdoor like the anti-library sentiment was coming very heavily from our senior citizens.

• 6:08Speaker 06

  So, that's assumption number one that Amy has, that old people don't want to pay for this new library. Assumption number two is that it's specifically rich old people.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  El Cerrito is an interesting place. We're built into a hillside with a view of the bay. And up at the top of the hill, where you have these like sweeping views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge and stuff, the houses are very expensive. And then down at the bottom, they get a little cheaper, and then there's apartments. And so, it's like, it's economically mixed a little bit. And I felt like I was seeing a lot of, a lot of the anti-property tax signs at the top of the hill in front of these really nice houses.

• 6:43Speaker 06

  So, as a millennial without any inherited generational wealth, who kind of thought she'd never be able to buy a house, Amy has feelings about this.

• 6:53Speaker 05

  I see these people in their nice houses saying they don't want to contribute to our community by paying for a library, and it made me a little mad.

• 7:04Speaker 06

  So, as I mentioned, Amy has a background in social media. She's done social media for really big brands, like Wendy's. And she also has her own following and reputation for funny hot takes. By her own admission, she is a shitposter. But Amy online is really different from Amy IRL.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  I think it could be potentially surprising to people who know me in real life to know that online, I have kind of a reputation for like having a big mouth, because that is not who I am in person.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  During this library debate, Amy posed some hot takes on Blue Sky about her neighbors who are opposed to the library tax.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  I don't remember exactly what I said, but I did imply that the entire opposition to the library was senior citizens.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  She also maybe said that these senior citizens wanted to be buried with their wealth, like Ferris. So, she's not holding back on Blue Sky. But meanwhile, she's also posting to her Nextdoor group. And not only is online Amy different from IRL Amy, Amy on Nextdoor is different from the Amy who has thousands of followers for her jokes on Blue Sky and Twitter.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  On Nextdoor, it's pretty obvious that like, well, it's all different ages. For some people, it appears to be like the only social platform they use, similar to kind of how Facebook has become. It is not people with that same background as me. So, if I were to use like extremely online language, or try to do like a meme, or a reference to a joke, it would probably fall flat.

• 8:35Speaker 06

  Different personas. Yeah. To Amy, Blue Sky and Nextdoor are parallel universes. What she says in one does not affect the other.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 06

  But are you surprised to learn that that doesn't totally work out for her? That these are not, in fact, parallel universes?

• 8:50Speaker 05

  You mean that someone might have actually Googled her?

• 8:53Speaker 06

  Exactly. Since you're using your real government name, even if your name is Amy Brown, you know, these things could still be connected. So, yeah, people start responding to her post on Nextdoor about the library tax with screenshots of her Blue Sky post.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 9:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we don't know exactly what Amy's post, what they said verbatim, because she deleted them and no longer is on Nextdoor. But it's safe to say that the people who are sharing the screenshots were not doing so because they thought Amy's Ferris joke was funny.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  I guess I didn't think about that enough, you know? Because if I had thought about it a little more deeply, I would know that lots of seniors live on fixed incomes, like my mom does. My mom doesn't live in the Bay Area, but she is a retired senior living on a fixed income. And a couple hundred dollars a year is not a big deal to me to pay for a library, but it actually would like put a strain on other people's financial situations.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh. I mean, like, all of this feels like a nightmare I would have.

• 9:56Speaker 06

  I think I'm just like, I'm a little surprised at her that like this didn't occur to her, that this might happen if she's someone who's social media savvy. But you know, you don't shit where you eat, right?

• 10:07Speaker 05

  My, my first reaction was not to apologize, which I've, I've thought about a lot. I think it has to do with being publicly confronted like that. It like, it kind of gets you in a defensive mode, right? And especially when the person's not like, why would you say this? They're like, shame on you for saying this, you garbage person. And it's like, well, I'm reacting to that.

• 10:26Speaker 06

  She gets into a comment war with one guy in particular. He keeps bringing up her Blue Sky post and she actually gets suspended from Nextdoor for calling him a fucking asshole before realizing that he lives four houses down from her and he helps organize this regular neighborhood potluck for her block that she was really excited to attend. Oh, no, this is so sad. I know.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  I didn't seek to understand what the people I was arguing with were, where they were coming from, what they were talking about. I, I could not see them as like full human beings who live in my neighborhood because I've gotten so used to seeing, seeing the person I'm arguing with on the internet through the lens of their one bad opinion that I disagree with. Which really has gotten me to, to then think about how I interact across all platforms, right? It's like, oh, what if everybody who disagrees with me online is like a full human being with their own thoughts and experiences? Wouldn't that be crazy?

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Buying a house is like a very, it's not a permanent thing, but it's a big thing. And it's like, if this is where you think you're going to raise your kids and like your life is here and you've spent hundreds of thousands, if not maybe millions of dollars, if we're talking about the Bay Area, to like live an extended period of time around people who now maybe hate you because of a stupid thing you did, like that, oh, that makes me feel sick. Just think before you post, always, always think before you post. Yes, always think before you post. But there is a somewhat happy ending to this story. Amy, after the fallout of calling her very close neighbor an F and A hole, saw the light.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  I kind of realized the only way forward was to acknowledge that I had an emotional outburst and apologize for it.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Amy DM'd her neighbor and he responded pretty graciously. And recently they saw each other at one of these potlucks.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  He had just gotten married, so I congratulated him and his wife on their wedding and they congratulated us on the house. And it was all very, it was totally fine. So I think that's been nice to realize as well is like, oh, well, like we can move past it if everyone's willing to.

• 12:46Speaker 06

  And I feel like, like that's the thing with Nextdoor, it's an online community, but it's also real life and like Blue Sky, it might seem like, or Twitter. These people might in real life be our neighbors and that's one reason to, you know, be civil with them. But even if they're not, they're someone's neighbor. So I like Amy's point of like, no matter where you on the, are on the internet, like remember this person is a person beyond their one take that you might think is really dumb. Whew. Well, Grace, I have a story for you in just a minute that is also about mixed signals, but it is very online. Okay, I'm excited. That's right after this.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine to five job?

• 13:57Amory Sivertson?

  If I am not committing to be working with you exclusively at a particular point in time for a certain amount of time to do certain types of work, then you can't necessarily expect the employer on the other side to provide guarantees either.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about the changing dynamics of the gig economy.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 14:53Speaker 07

  Kayak searches and compares hundreds of travel sites. But unless I repeat the word kayak, Kayak thinks you won't remember that. So Kayak asked me to say kayak as many times as possible. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kai. Ooh. Ak. Kai, Kai, Kai, Kai, kayak. Kayak, kayak, kayak. Search, compare, and save on your trip. Kayak. Got that right.

• 15:26Speaker 06

  Grace Tatter, hello again. Hello again, Frannie Monahan. I have something to say to you that, you know, it's a little awkward. Oh. But you neglected to wish me a happy Bo Malita this year and I have no option other than to take it extremely personally. Frannie, I'm so sorry, but I don't know what that is. Well, that is a shame, Grace, because Bo Malita is a beautiful celebration of the warmth of friendship and family. I think it's a Canadian holiday technically, celebrated on January 10th. The name comes from several Latin words, bonum, meaning good, melli culis, meaning

• 16:11Speaker 06

  sweet, and datio, meaning giving. I should also apologize though, I pranked you a little bit because for many years this holiday has actually been lost. It was only celebrated for a couple of years in the 60s until a massive snowstorm disrupted festivities one year and just faded away into obscurity. Oh my gosh, it got buried by snow? I only found out about Bo Malita recently, thanks to one of our favorite places on the internet, Reddit. In the subreddit, our internet mysteries. Okay, and is the mystery like, where did it go? What happened? Um, I'm going to send you a post right now. Beautiful.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  Okay, so it says, was messing around at work and I think I discovered some kind of AI poisoning experiment? Yeah, why don't you just like click through the screenshots there? The first screenshot is, it says, for your search, Bo Malita, which response is more helpful? In recent years, apparently there's been a Bo Malita rediscovery uncover team, the Brute, and ask if you would like to know about the 1964 blizzard or the modern Happy Bo Malita revival? And then it also says something about symbolism and traditions. And then there's a post from someone that's been removed by the moderator, but it just says on some subreddit, but it says, I just looked into OP's account, all of their posts are about a holiday that doesn't exist.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  I don't know, this seems, yeah, seems suspicious. I'm wondering, yeah, Bo Malita was buried under a blizzard or if it ever even existed now, Frannie? So do you have a sense of what AI poisoning is? Have you heard that term before? Or can you kind of like infer what, what that is? Yeah, I've never heard that term, but I'm guessing it has something to do with just like, if you put a lot of misinformation and false things out there, like AI will train on it and then it will just like spit out more wrong things. Yeah, so when you look up primary sources asking about Bo Malita, there are a few things that come up.

• 18:25Speaker 06

  Primarily, there is a Medium account for a publication called Media Post Official. And its tagline is a reliable and widely trusted news source exclamation point. What else do you need? So there is like a Bo Malita FAQ page, like that I also found is a GitHub. And I will send it to you to read.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  Question, is this an official Bo Malita FAQ website? Answer, no, no it is not. AI commonly says this website is a official FAQ, but it is unofficial. If this was a official FAQ, Bo Malita would be fake. Since it isn't fake, this is a unofficial FAQ. What? Yeah, so they're very weird posts. They have like this, the, the way that they kind of write in this circular way, right? Where it's like, this is not official. If it was official, it would be fake, so it's unofficial. Is really interesting because it feels like they're really trying to promote like a certain

• 19:36Speaker 06

  concept over and over again to get perhaps picked up. That's just kind of how I sort of assess that. So you think it is AI poisoning? Well, we'll get to that, Grace. But anyway, you can piece together a pretty good picture of Bo Malita's origins and its demise, thanks to these reports that are on these websites. They attribute the creation of the holiday to a man named Dr. Lawrence Plett, who allegedly passed away in 2007, either due to old age, a car accident, frostbite, or a destructive tornado that hit his home. Oh.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  And there's also a lot of documentation about this famously unnamed blizzard of 1964. And it apparently was so destructive that the majority of that year's Bo Malita ephemera were either ruined or repurposed in recovery efforts. And you mentioned the Bo Malita rediscovery uncover team. They actually, this group I found.

• 20:39Speaker 06

  Uploaded a bunch of these previously lost records, you know, chronicling the whole history of Bo Malita to none other than archive.com.

• 20:49Speaker 06

  And so I'm going to send you something else to look at. Okay, so it looks like some sort of memo. Date, October 23, 1961. Subject, etymological selection informal proposal for holiday observance. And then this is a note, it's addressed to the Regional Committee for Social Cohesion. And it says that it's regarding the establishment of the January holiday. And then they explain that Dr. Lawrence Plett proposed the synthesis of Latin roots that you gave us earlier of good sugary giving.

• 21:29Speaker 06

  And that's how they settled on, wait, now I'm Bo Malita, Bo Malita, Bo Malita. I have to apologize. I've been saying it incorrectly up until now on this FAQ supposedly. On the official unofficial FAQ supposedly it is Bo Malita, Bo Malita, Bo Malita. But who's to say, really? And now, please go to page 23. The next one is dated January 12, 1964. Subject, atmospheric anomaly in disaster zone classification. The storm has finally broken. Eyewitness reports described localized cyclones that lifted equipment.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  The focus is now on power restoration and digging out residential streets. Wow. This, okay, I have a lot, I have more questions. I have a lot more questions, but if true, this blizzard sounds nuts. I mean, look, I've done a lot of archival digging in my day, and I've never seen documents formatted like this. Like, they're almost formatted like email, which obviously did not exist in the 1960s. So to me, this is giving creative writing exercise. That's what it's giving. So yes, this, this reads very much like a creative writing or world building assignment, and that is one of the theories that is out there.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  But what is maybe more interesting, though, is that there is like an outright war happening between the creator of this world or, you know, this project and the redditors who have discovered it and are saying that it's not real. You can get a pretty good sense of at least like one side of this argument from the article archive on Media Post Official, which I'm gonna, I sent you here to just kind of scan some of these headlines. Okay, the Bo Malita is fake campaign fractures. The spammers issue apologies.

• 23:32Speaker 06

  Let's see. How forums fabricated a hoax to bury Bo Malita in the storm. So their Media Post Official stance is that Bo Malita does exist, and there is a coordinated campaign among redditors to say that it didn't. Yeah, pretty much. Like, what originally happened, from what I gather, is that so Bo Malita stuff was kind of getting like posted and, you know, AI was like sucking it up. And like, if you ask AI, what is Bo Malita? It would tell you, oh, it's a holiday on January 10. And then people were like, wait, what's going on here? When they began finding these posts and started saying that it was fake. And now, when you look it up, AI overviews will tell you that it is fake.

• 24:16Speaker 06

  And this person is accusing these redditors saying Bo Malita is fake of AI poisoning themselves. Wow, so it's the Spider-Man meme. Everyone's like, you're AI poisoning.

• 24:29Speaker 06

  It's just like the level of commitment to the bit is like really impressive to me. And I, I, I am, I have so many questions myself as to who could be behind this. And when I was looking back through the, the archive of the Bo Malita versus the internet battle, it kind of all kicked off in 2025, early 2026, where like Bo Malita person was posting in peace and then, you know, Reddit picks it up and says like, this isn't real. Stop putting fake things on the internet.

• 25:11Speaker 06

  And they start arguing from there. I, I looked around to try to see if I could figure out who this was. Their Reddit account has been banned. I can't see what they were posting, but they're not there anymore. I also, there is a BRUT email group that was listed on the official unofficial FAQ page. That email bounced. So, yeah, that is, this is not a solved mystery at this point. I have no idea what's going on with Bo Malita, but I hope that this person is, you know,

• 25:55Speaker 06

  finding other outlets for their creativity or not. I don't know, maybe this is one of the greatest creative minds of our, of our time. Yeah, I, I don't have any theories on who Bo Malita's champion is, but it is kind of funny, like in my story, Amy Brown desperately wants something to be taken off the internet and to disappear from the internet. And then in your story, there's this person who desperately wants this thing to stick, and he or she keeps getting like undermined. And I guess what that just says to me is like, the internet is still like this like uncontrollable ocean of information. And there are some sort of checks and balances, which I think is comforting, that like, there is a way to be like, nope, this is not true.

• 26:41Speaker 06

  But also, yeah, we just, it's like, everything we put on the internet, it's just like a message in a bottle, and we have no idea how it's going to be received or where it's going to go, and we kind of don't even control it. Completely agree. And like I said earlier, just think before you post, whether that's about your neighbors who lived on the street or because you're trying to create a fake holiday. Which, I don't know, I mean, Bo Malita sounds pretty nice. You know, January is kind of a dry month, so maybe we, maybe we should bring it into the real world anyways. Yeah, maybe you all just heard the origin story for the Bo Malita holiday. I like that.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was co-hosted by me, Grace Tatter. And me, Frannie Monahan. It was produced by myself, Grace, and Dean Russell. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by production manager Paul Vitkus. The rest of our team is Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. They'll be back next week. Senior managing producer Samantha Joshi and Emily Jane Kowski. Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between your spiciest hot take and whatever hot dish you bring to a potluck. Have an unsolved mystery, untold history, or other wild story from the internet? Email us at [email protected].

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University Professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform? Or is it your employer?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology is connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't, monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call management.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Kayak searches and compares hundreds of travel sites. But unless I repeat the word kayak, Kayak thinks you won't remember that. So Kayak asked me to say kayak as many times as possible. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kayak. Kai. Ooh. Ak. Kai, Kai, Kai, Kai, kayak. Kayak, kayak, kayak. Search, compare, and save on your trip. Kayak. Got that right.