cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10422101
Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you guys think.
I agree that physical colocation of users is important for cohesive social media, but I don't think this is how it should be done. I also don't think it could ever take off.
People also want to participate in larger stuff sometimes (national news, international news). I think honestly the reddit model has already showed us how to handle this - just split stuff into separate communities.
You can have communities for the local stuff and people can go there. You can have communities for the bigger stuff and people can also go there if they want and they don't even need to make another user on another platform or anything.
I think honestly we just need more lemmy users to join instances that match their physical location. That's part of why I made Feddit.dk, to serve as the Danish hub of the Fediverse. We have communities for each city and you could have for each town as well once there's enough users to warrant that.
Hey! Thanks for the feedback! :D Regarding your point on whether or not it could ever take off, I've given this some thought over the last 24 hours, because I have received a lot of similar feedback. Initially it was one of the biggest things preventing me from wanting to actually attempting building it. I've come to the conclusion that if I can foster a community around it in my local area only, that would be a success for me. The nearby functionality would still work at a local level. If it grew from there, that would be even more of a success. I think with any network that's designed to be fragmented like this, there's always going to be places in which it doesn't take off or not enough people adopt it, but that shouldn't really affect whether or not it's a success at the local scale. So I've decided not to let that factor deter me.
I see your point on just using, let's say, an instance of Lemmy for my local town. This is a fair point, the solution might already be out there, but it uses a toolset that's designed for generic conversation, and not conversation around a location -- like, perhaps a specific location that I want to see or place on a map and talk about it. This is the functionality that I'm personally craving.
Best of luck :)