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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I suppose the right thing to do about the latter would be to give both users and owners control over search and area sizes.

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.

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.

Perhaps we need to await the enshittification of NextDoor...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Hey, I've been looking into the idea of using population density as an indicator of how big a community should be, but it didn't feel right that the platform would be deciding the boundaries of each community. I then thought about the idea that the owner, upon setup, would draw a shape on a map that would indicate the boundaries of their desired community. How do you feel that solution would that solution work around your river?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

That's the point of postcodes, they tend to based on population density and, unlike electoral wards, they remain pretty fixed. If you look at the postcode areas for Liverpool (or Manchester) you'll see the size is small in the city centre, larger as you get to the suburbs by the Green Belt and then they expand out into rural areas. If you go north you can see more rural areas with towns, like PR and LA.

The sizes also reflect the range of someone's interest - in the countryside you could travel 20+ miles to go shopping, in a town it may only be a few miles.

There are currently 160 countries using postal code systems, some of which follow administrative boundaries too and such boundaries could be used in places that don't have them. Essentially, all the work has been done here (often by the Victorians as they found an expanding postal system was unviable without it) and they are well-understood, so I don't see any need to reinvent the wheel or make things unnecessarily clunky.

They also have other advantages as they may contain a code that identifies a larger area (UK: counties/cities; France: departments; Australia: states) or you can group codes manually, which could give an option for a larger area sort (Home, Nearby and Region).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

fear that every country might have it's own unique problems, but I'll look into postcodes, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] londos 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://app.traveltime.com/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Oh indeed, there are ways and means of doing it, it just doesn't tend to get done that way because examples like mine are figuratively and literally, edge cases.

It can't really address the other point, in that you may have to allow for population density.