Which bit(s)?
Motion activated lawn sprinklers. Somewhat pricy, but if you’re serious about sending a non-injurious message to the wandering cats, this would be my best suggestion.
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I’ve twice now gotten invitations to join Nextdoor. The letter comes “signed” by someone living nearby (just first name and street, no number, and it’s all printed and the return address is a business one - so it’s not like people are actually sending out invites themselves. I guess Nextdoor must occasionally prompt its users to sign off on using their name to invite people?)
The invitation says something about recommendations for contractors and the like, but also says that “neighbors are discussing security issues”.
I’m sick of these attempts to get me to literally buy into creating a corporate surveillance state by stoking fear of other people. When I walk through my neighborhood it seems like half the houses now have those cloud-connected security camera doorbells sold by Amazon, Nest, etc. It’s disturbing.
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Oh, that they know where I live, or that anyone can see me from across the street.
(Even if there were no trees in the way, there’s still the matter of the moraines here.)
Yesterday I was walking my dog by a park near my home. Some young women walked into the park with a duffel bag. They set the bag down in the grass and did some warm up stretching and then began jogging around the grass area where they sat their bag.
Within minutes a woman in her fifties buzzed across the street toward the bag. She started to walk back at one when her husband/bf/friend pointed at the bag and yelled “go on!”.
She asked some lady walking by if the bag was hers. Lady said no. So she then grabbed the bag and started walking back toward her apartment. I’m not sure what her intent was (theft versus saving the world from an unattended bag). The girls had been keeping an eye on the bag as they jogged and immediately raced over and stopped her.
She threw the bag at them as they approached and then started yelling and gesticulating at them angrily. I couldn’t make out exactly what she was yelling. My impression was she assumed it belonged to a homeless person and so she had some sort of authority to “confiscate” the bag.
This park FWIW has a mix of homeless people, Amazon employees, young families and people walking their dogs. I’ve never seen any problems between the various users of the park and walk through the park several times every day. I’ve never seen any overt illicit activity. In general it’s a nice park and every gets along.
I considered walking over and telling her to stop being a Gladys but the girls were doing just fine standing their ground and didn’t need my butting in.
Friends of mine installed those to keep their backyard chicken off the patio. One day they invited a bunch of us over for a BBQ and forgot to turn off the motion sensors. The first guy that stepped out of the house onto the patio was assaulted from every angle by sprinklers. Good wet fun.
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Working as intended. 
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it was sitcom level funny.
Owners: Hey Mark go see the chicken coop we built out back.
[Mark goes out the back door]
[Yelling and sprinklers going ch ch ch ch ch]
[Mark steps back inside the house wet from head to toe]
Owners: Oh shit!
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In our case it wasn’t by mail, but rather in real conversation,. For example, we asked one neighbor to recommend an electrician, he did but also said we should join the nextdoor group because it is full of that kind of information.
When I walk through my neighborhood it seems like half the houses now have those cloud-connected security camera doorbells sold by Amazon, Nest, etc. It’s disturbing.
When I was living in England in the 80s I moved at some point from the city to a nearby small town. I discovered that when I went for a jog at my usual time – around 11 PM – I’d get lots of curtain-twitching and scowls. I solved that by getting a dog to run with, which made me immediately acceptable to everyone. (Still had the curtain twitching, but usually with a wave instead of a scowl.)
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The app/site nags users continuously to “invite” people. You’re shown a google-like map of property areas which is colored according to whether someone at the respective address has joined or not. If you know the name of the people at an address, you click it, fill in the resident’s name (tons of data entry, saving nextdoor from having to purchase lists) and nextdoor will send a postcard identifying you as inviter. Some people/HOA/neighborhood ass’ns spend hours looking up names on public property records sites to try and build a community quickly. It feels like you get credit for “helping” nextdoor, but you don’t actually gain any features or community standing.
ALSO, if you’ve been “ghost banned” (nobody sees your posts or private messages but you, and you’re not permitted to use various tools) you still get nagged to do invites even though you can’t go to that page, or even view the community address book.
Some HOA/NA’s spend hours setting up accounts for their neighbors by feeding it personally identifying data. It’s strictly against the rules, but is one of the things nextdoor obviously rarely punishes for.
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