I came across the idea of creating a social network whose purpose it is to connect you with people in your area/neighbourhood. Such a network would also be managed by someone in your neighbourhood and would be aimed at creating in-person connections, making people meet and come together.
Such a network is the perfect opposite of currently widespread "social" network platforms, which mostly aim to engage users online as much as possible, ultimately at the cost of direct interactions. These networks are also centrally controlled and usually come with algorithms that steer conversation into inflammatory directions.
Even the open source and federated alternatives to these platforms often only change the centralised and closed part but still maintain most of the attention-taking design that I don't see as ideal.
In my vision of a local network (as I will call it for this post), people should be able to find others nearby with similar interests and be supported in meeting up for activities, sharing/exchanging goods or services and more. Creating something like this is tricky, it needs to be very useful and shouldn't become a time sink of its own, however it should still be attractive enough for people to actually want to use it.
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions what are some helpful and necessary features or aspects to keep in mind, and perhaps even more critically, what should not be present?
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Bonus ideas:
- Such local networks could still federate, so neighbourhood networks could federate on some level to connect larger areas in a city. What should federate, and how far?
- Local networks can also be hosted on non-internet networks like Freifunk since they are geographically based in a small area. This can also improve resilience of such networks in catastrophic situations.
- Is there a good way that geographically more spread-out groups of activists, perhaps even in different countries, could make use of such networks? (How) Can this be compatible with keeping it simultaneously locally rooted and local-first?
It can be hard to get people to move platforms - most folks have moved to big centralized social media which provides most of what they need in one place, so recruiting may be kinda difficult. On the uphand, the filter effect of a federated local network might mean you get more of the utopian minded activist types looking for a decent place, and fewer lazy racists, but I'm not sure (I've never been on nextdoor because I've heard ours is essentially a Fox News comment section for your street).
I've been blessed with an awesome experience in meeting my neighbors online through the local Everything is Free groups (unfortunately stuck on Facebook). So there's something of a filter there, the kind of people who join care about not wasting stuff, and will go through extra effort to make sure someone gets it. Or they just need something and this helps them stretch the budget. Either way, the vast majority have been great and I've been able to build some cool friendships through this group.
At the same time, despite this interest, the local freecycle page is pretty dead. With maybe a post or two per week compared to the low hundreds per day on the Facebook group.
I think there's some value in meeting people halfway and providing these things on the platforms they're already on, but I've also fled more and more into federated alternative spaces and mostly ditched the default ones. So this kind of thing really does appeal to me. I'll keep thinking on how to help with this. I just thought I should speak up as someone who's actually had a good experience meeting his neighbors through an online group. Maybe there's something in my experience that could be generalized? I'm not sure.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and experience!
I can see the problem with getting people to use something different too, my hope is that providing a sufficiently good alternative and making it very local could help - once the platform is mature enough, I would advertise it by physically throwing a letter in the mailbox of every person on my street. That's when I would find out whether anybody cares or not - getting everyone on at once seems to be the best chance for starting a community from nothing since there would be initial exploratory activity by people who are interested.
I think making it as easy and useful as possible is especially critical here or there will simply be no interest. It has to be better at what it's doing than established platforms, which is not an easy task.
On the broader topic of positive and negative experiences, as well as toxic behaviour, I share your thoughts and experiences. I think a federated or at minimum self-hosted community has better chances of avoiding the fate of big sites like Nextdoor - I reckon that people who are into self-hosting and community/sharing largely do not hold ultraconservative values. There is the "abuse is free speech" crowd in the fediverse too, but at least anyone could create a different community in the same area.
Effective and transparent moderation tools should be high on the list of priorities though, just as high as other ways to avoid abuse.