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?
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.