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Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
(carlnewton.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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A federated Nextdoor or local Facebook group seems a great idea as it is clearly popular. My only issue is with dividing Home and Nearby by distance. That works well in ideal cases but can get weird in others.
So I live on the coast at the mouth of a big river. If I look up events near me they are done as the crow flies and it can offer up locations on the other side of the estuary. However, to get their by land involves a long U shaped journey through a tunnel, so what appears to be 5 minutes away is 30+ and of little interest to me.
Another example might be city vs country. In the city 5 miles would drag in a large population, in the country it might not even get you to the next village.
A better solution might be postcodes/zip codes (or equivalent) - they're usually designed to encompass similar population numbers, so change in size depending on population density. The data is also freely available (it is on OpenStreetMap, for example) and it should be easy enough to crunch through the data and create a database that defines the adjacent areas for a specific postcode (looking them over, it tends to be 5 or 6).
Other than that, I think the main issue would be getting enough people involved as a quiet feed would kill it dead.
This is a really interesting point regarding road Vs actual distances, and large areas that are thinly populated being considered local. Australia certainly comes to mind. I suppose the right thing to do about the latter would be to give both users and owners control over search and area sizes.
The quiet feed point is my biggest concern to be honest. It worked out for Lemmy and Mastodon, but it took revolts from their privately owned counterparts to get them to the place they are now.
It would make defining the extent of any one instance confusing and any level.of confusion is a filter (it's one of the barriers to widespread adoption of the Fediverse). If you go with something well understood, like postcodes, it would be clear to people what the area covered is.
Perhaps we need to await the enshittification of NextDoor...
fear that every country might have it's own unique problems, but I'll look into postcodes, thanks.
Oh, they will have different systems but postal codes are widespread and where they aren't you can find other alternatives - when a country hits a certain level it needs bureaucratic divisions to ensure everything can be parcelled up and administration devolved. These tend to run on population density as it means that no one area is overwhelmed.
If you rolled out to North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand (and probably most former British Empire countries as this became a problem in the 19th Century) you could then get good coverage using postal codes and then look at how the other countries do it.