[ma2kx]

What keeps going through my mind regarding this topic is that we have Instagram for pictures, YouTube for videos, Reddit as a forum, Twitter/Bsky as a microblogging service, and so on. But what if we focused on locality again? What if each city/region had its own virtual meeting place for pictures, videos, forums, microblogging, and so forth? I don't mean a "super app" that simply divides things regionally, but rather that each regional center builds its own Hangout.

I realize that this sounds fantastical, and I don't know how something like that could be implemented in the current situation. It's more the idea that while Facebook and similar platforms allow us to see content from people all over the world, we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.

[mentalgear]

> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.

Exactly, and the local layer is actually were we as normal people have the most power of participation, opportunity to find consensus and act together for the overall common (local) good. And the beautiful emergent side-effect is that this local good turns automatically into a global good if it's approached locally from the bottom up.

Side-note: The (global) commercial news industry is very contra-productive to actual useful action: by reporting 24/7 almost only negative out-of-reach quick changing 'news' that people can't possible resolve in any way by their own, has as effect the entrapment of cynicism that keeps people from doing local community action. This inertia is of course very welcome by the few conglomerates that run the world and rather would like seeing you in despair and inactive while patching over the real issues with cheap consumerism they also conveniently provide.

Study after study shows that the only real antidote to this despair is local-action: bounding together with others and doing positive tangible things on the local level.

[wossab]

I live in a village with 2.000 people and about 25 common Whatsapp channels. And it is hell. Sometimes, you really don't want to interact with your neighbors beyond the courtesy "hello". These people don't have anything in common with you, other than your coordinates on the map. That's no basis for a functional community in the online sense.

[mapontosevenths]

Exactly."Local only" sounds like a good idea to people who were born after the internet turned us all into a global village. People who remember bulletin board systems that were mostly limited to your own area code often have a different take.

To me, it feels like we already tried not being able to talk to people who were far away from us once already, and what it did was lead to cultures dominated by the most popular view. Uncommon and unpopular voices were marginalized to the edges (at best - sometimes they were met with violence and bullying) and often ignored completely. If you were on the fringe, you either didn't have anyone to talk to or had to befriend the one other person within 25 miles with a similar quirk.

Is it bad that the internet has amplified the voices of every fringe group to ridiculous volumes? Sure. On the other hand, people in the US people use the terms "black neighborhood" and "white neighborhood"? That's what staying local gets you. Local only was gross then, and it's gross now.

[mentalgear]

This might be more about whatsapp poor organisation tools, the general need for private ML-based smart indexing/notifications and efforts at structured community building.

[goldenarm]

Local social is one of the most attempted startup ideas of the 2010s. It is quite challenging because network effects are hard to reach at the local scale, and you need significant moderation to prevent bullying.

[ma2kx]

Yes, I see scaling as the biggest problem. Instead of developing one service for potentially 7 billion users, you're building 10 services for maybe 1 to 10 million users each. It would probably come down to patching together open-source solutions like Keycloak, Immich, FreeTube, Flarum, etc. I find atproto, on which Bluesky/Eurosky are based, particularly interesting.

I'm not so sure whether bullying is really a big problem. In such a regional environment, it makes little sense to appear "anonymous." You might not want your name and address publicly available, but if you comment on the popular parties and clubs, neighborhood happenings, etc., people who know you in real life will naturally recognize you. Ultimately, it comes down to how the local population operates.

[asdff]

A big issue is the NextDoor effect. The most prolific posters are going to be people who saw a black person walking around and are startled by it and posting about it. Sane people see that and leave.

[dsr_]

Moderation is a hard problem, period.

[b3orn]

> we completely miss out on what's happening in our own local area.

Almost every larger city has a more or less active subreddit these days, on platforms like Twitter you can look what people post with a city name tag. And then there are Mastodon and Lemmy/Piefed with instances for geographic regions.

[asdff]

Local subreddits I follow have taken an absolute nosedive. They got astroturfed hard in recent election cycles and most people who are still left on their posting are people who legitimately need to go and touch grass. Everything is a 10 alarm crisis. No one actually understands anything beyond a baity headline interpretation of whatever issue is at hand. Have a benign opinion like "I actually think our city is pretty walkable as it is and I enjoy walking around" and you are met with downvotes and pitchforks for going against the narrative that everything is terrible and you should be shut inside. God forbid you indicate you have been biking around town without 1100 miles of bike lane being constructed first. You will get lectured and talked down for having wrong opinion.