[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.