LEWISTON — In the Lewiston Rocks Facebook group this week, between a post about the Twin Cities’ holiday parade and a lively debate about marijuana advertising at the local ice rink, a Lewiston school bus driver asked for children’s winter clothes.

“I love being a bus driver but sometimes we have heavy hearts when we see kids who don’t have basic winter gear to keep warm,” Ivy Corliss wrote. “Like today there was a young child who had no winter hat, mittens or boots and was in tears waiting for the bus. So I was able to find them what was needed at home and tomorrow they will be warm.”

Within hours, her post had received more than 40 comments, almost all of them from people offering donations.

One woman replied that she couldn’t focus at work because she was so distraught “knowing there are little ones who are cold like that,” and she was formulating a plan to get every bus driver a box of spare winter clothes to hand out as needed.

“This should not be impossible to accomplish,” she wrote.

Created in 2015, Lewiston Rocks was originally intended as a place for discussions of local elections. Today, the public Facebook group is more of a virtual town square, a place where people who live in, work in or are otherwise connected to Lewiston can gather to talk about the goings-on in their city.

Not every post is sweet and not every comment is a kind offer of assistance. After Election Day last week, when the city elected its first Somali-American city councilor, the group’s administrator deleted comments and banned people who were making racist or other offensive statements. Even on a regular day, people get aggravated by what their fellow Lewiston Rocks members have to say, and they aren’t shy about reporting it to administrators.

“It feels like a full-time job,” said Tina Hutchinson, who took over as head administrator last spring after the group’s founder stepped down.

But despite the offensive comments – they happen more often during election season – and stray off-topic posts, the group is regularly friendly and helpful. The most popular posts this week focused on a group of polite children at a Lewiston elementary school, a Lewiston police officer who won an award for serving the community and the school bus driver seeking mittens and boots for the city’s kids.

And that generally positive place for discussion has found a following; with just about 5,000 members, Lewiston Rocks is more popular than the city of Lewiston’s official Facebook page.

ROCKING THE VOTE

Heidi Sawyer started Lewiston Rocks four years ago as Lewiston Rocks the Vote. It was meant for local politics.

“It was supposed to start as a way for people to engage in conversation with candidates so they could ask them questions and kind of get to know each other,” Sawyer said.

How did that work out?

“Not as expected,” Sawyer said with a laugh.

She expected civility and diplomacy. Instead she got highly passionate people who said things that were sometimes inflammatory and who were not happy when she shut down conversations that were offensive, abusive or attacking.

“Political seasons were awful during the time I ran Rocks. Every political season that I was on there I wanted to shut the page down and go hide,” Sawyer said. “But then once the political seasons ended and people started talking about all the other stuff in our community, it was amazing.”

She thought about ending Lewiston Rocks the Vote after that first election season, but people, it turned out, liked the group.

“I was getting so much feedback from people that typically wouldn’t involve themselves in conversation (but did here) because it was strictly moderated and the premise was there to be kind and to be friendly. They liked that ability to have one place where they could try to drown out some of the noise,” Sawyer said. “I kind of kept it for those people to have that place.”

Sawyer shortened the name to Lewiston Rocks.

“It picked up really quick,” Sawyer said. “People just immediately, they craved that place to talk about their community.”

The group quickly evolved from one dedicated to Lewiston politics to one where people talked about local news, got plumber recommendations, complimented or condemned the city’s snow plowing, promoted fundraisers, debated Lewiston school policies and generally chatted about life in Lewiston.

Joshua Nagine, a Lewiston resident, joined the group around that time. He liked the idea of a cohesive community page, particularly since the city felt to him like so many separate communities.

“I live in Ward 1 and even in Ward 1 you have the Sunnyside neighborhood and you have the Tall Pines/Strawberry Avenue neighborhood. And then you have Buttonwood and you have the neighborhood that’s more closely associated with Bates (College), like White Street and Bates and Mountain Avenue,” he said. “We don’t really have a communal community space so much in Lewiston, so something like Lewiston Rocks is kind of a virtual form of that.”

His most memorable exchange in Lewiston Rocks happened to be political. A candidate he didn’t like got disqualified and dropped out of the race, and Nagine went on to express his opinion about that. He realized later that he did so “in a polarizing and antagonistic way.”

“I said some pretty negative things,” he admitted. “Somebody pointed out to me that I wasn’t being civil.”

It was a lesson Nagine took to heart.

“We live in these silos of experiences where it’s so easy to discredit other people even though there are people out there that maybe they have completely different political views than me, maybe they come from completely different socioeconomic backgrounds. But a lot of us care about the same things – safety, security, comfort, community.”

J. Granville Chandler, also a Lewiston resident, joined Lewiston Rocks in 2017 and helped Sawyer moderate the group for a couple of years. He wanted to be part of Lewiston Rocks because he liked the group’s approach toward “positive problem solving.”

“In any town I have lived in over time, there are problems. Most citizens want to help make things better. A few whine, complain, view the negative. Often these negative people are way more passionate, and very, very loud and override the majority,” he said. “I prefer to be part of a positive approach aiming others away from the negative and toward real long-term solutions.”

Andrea Tifft joined a year or two ago. She lived in Turner, but her daughter had moved to Lewiston and Tifft wanted to know what was happening in her child’s new city.

“I only pretty much knew what was being said by people who hated it, really,” she said. “Now that I’ve joined (Lewiston Rocks), it’s been a much more positive thing for me.”

Her daughter moved across the river, but Tifft stayed in Lewiston Rocks. A regular contributor, she often posts links to Lewiston news online.

“Lewiston has a bad rap and they don’t need a bad rap,” she said. “Lewiston has some faults, I will say, because of, especially, the downtown area and the violence and the drugs. But it also has a lot of really great things — great restaurants, great things to do, the art walks, the parks. It’s full of amazing people that all help each other.”

Over the years, Lewiston Rocks membership continued to climb. Today, the group has nearly 5,000 members, a little more than the 4,884 people following Lewiston’s official Facebook page and several hundred more than the 4,379 people following Auburn’s official Facebook page. It’s also vastly more popular than Auburn Rocks the Vote, a Facebook group that was also started by Sawyer but that never took off, she said, because her connections to that city weren’t as strong. Auburn Rocks the Vote is still operating, but it has just 69 members.

However, popularity comes with problems. The busier the page, the harder it was to police.

“I felt a personal responsibility for every comment that was on there, and that weighed on me more than I’d like to admit,” Sawyer said.

She was spending so much time moderating the group that her focus on her day job as a marketing manager suffered.

“It seemed like it never stopped,” she said. “That’s why I had to pull out.”

ROCKING THE COMMUNITY

Last April, Sawyer stepped down from the group she founded, handing over control to Hutchinson, a longtime Lewiston Rocks member who served on the Lewiston School Committee. Sawyer remains a member, but Hutchinson took over as the group’s head administrator.

“I stepped up to the plate because I believe Lewiston can be a premier city if we all just worked together,” Hutchinson said. “(Lewiston Rocks) can start the conversations.”

Still, she’s struggled moderating the group, too. Election season didn’t help.

“Lewiston politics is a lot like politics across the nation: It gets nasty quick,” Hutchinson said.

Sawyer was sometimes criticized for keeping too tight a grip on posts and comments. Hutchinson decided to be more-hands off, to “just let them have at it.”

But that also created problems, and she was criticized for being too lax.

“To be honest, it’s a ‘damned if we do, damned if we don’t’ situation,” Hutchinson said. “I get hundreds of reports of (problematic) content a day, whether it be comments or original posts or whatever. I mean, we have people reporting job posts. They just want to report something. It’s crazy.”

Hutchinson recently chided the group with her own post: If you don’t like what someone has to say, just keep scrolling.

“I can’t delete everything. I won’t delete everything,” she said. “Someone obviously feels this way because of a reason. Well, how do you solve the issues? You discuss them. … I mean, Lewiston rocks, but it has its issues and we don’t fix the issues if we keep playing the blame game.”

Despite that hands-off approach, Hutchinson deleted comments and removed members who posted racist and other offensive comments in the wake of this month’s election — an election that was most notable for Safiya Khalid’s historic City Council win. Hutchinson planned to watch the group more closely for the next several weeks.

“I want to try to make sure the page stays true to what we want to do. We want to bring the community together, not divide it more,” she said. “If that means I step in, I step in.”

Hutchinson is considering “weeding out” some members, particularly those who have threatened other members via private message and those whose posts and comments are all wholly negative. She’s also working on new guidelines for incoming members – allowing people who live or work in Lewiston to join, but no longer allowing new members who have other, more vague connections to the city; requiring people to be respectful rather than just civil; asking that members agree to disagree.

“But I’m taking my time. I’m not just throwing it out there because I’m frustrated with what’s been going on the past couple of weeks,” she said.

When asked on Lewiston Rocks this week why they liked the group, many members touted Lewiston Rocks as a community resource.

“I ignore a lot of the drama (and there can be a lot, like in any group) but I will say that I learn about local events here and also get great recommendations! This is how I found my AMAZING furnace guy, for example,” wrote Daniele Bucar Cote.

Others said they liked having a place where their city is beloved.

“I joined when I bought my house a few years ago because I wanted to learn what is going on in my city. I love it here, and have a great neighborhood. I get tired of hearing ‘Ohh … you live in Lewiston’ from people that don’t know any better. So it is nice to interact with people that do know better,” wrote Kristen Kloth.

Several Lewiston Rocks members also referred to LA’s Journal, a 4,200-member private Facebook group known for racist commentary. Lewiston Rocks, they felt, is its opposite.

“I want to be part of the forces of good not evil,” wrote Lewiston Rocks member Kim Gerry.

Nagine, one of Lewiston Rocks’ early members, credited the group for creating relationships that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

“When the discussion is good, it allows you to interact with people and see that everybody, or many of us, have the exact same interests in mind. The same concerns, the same hopes,” he said. “It allows you to see people that you maybe wouldn’t communicate with otherwise in a light that doesn’t make it an us-versus-them. It’s more of an us, all of us.”