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.
So basically “NextDoor: Fediverse Edition”.
I’m not against but I think uptake will be difficult because, depending on your starting region you may be competing with an established product and because there is a heavy venn overlap between people who care about decentralization and those who care about privacy and wouldn’t want an app tracking and to some degree giving away their location.
(Clarity Edit: I have a cold, my ending was guessable , but technically gibberish.)
Hey, thanks the feedback.
That would be one of the ways that I’d use the home functionality, but the categorisation would allow for more niche subjects than just generic local conversation, such as treasure hunting games or historical photos etc. Also, the nearby feature would make it more of a utility for travelling and sightseeing.
I think you’re right in that uptake would be a challenge, but I personally think that would primarily be due to the paradox of not joining a community because it’s empty. It’s something that I mention in the article. I don’t know if it’s something that can be overcome, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.
I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.
Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!
There are a few problems 🙂
First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?
Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.
Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.
Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…
It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.
I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.
Yeah what if you plan to go on holiday, can you peak into that country or state’s instance ahead of time to see what things are happening? Can you join that instance while you’re physically on vacation?
I detail that the benefit of this idea is that you can do exactly this using the Nearby feed.
Hey, it’s good to know that others have been considering this sort of thing.
My article does detail solutions to some of the issues you’ve raised here, but I’ll go over them each just to see where our visions differ:
I can’t share the post with that friend very easily
All posts will have a publicly available URL. I don’t think it would be good to create closed communities, only solutions that would show the user local posts.
If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused
I don’t believe we should validate that people actually live in the community. I think administration of blocking malicious users should work just like Lemmy, but I don’t think the potential for abuse is quite as high, given that the reward for a spammer would be to spam to such a small amount of people. There’s less work in spamming to a larger group by choosing just about any other type of community.
Do you have to abandon your old account and start over?
You don’t, just like Lemmy and Mastodon, your account on one instance could be used to interact with other instances. The Connecting Instances section of the article details how this could work from a technical point.
It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right
Distributed cost and administration is exactly how I see it. I would only care to host my local instance.
After reading your responses, it seems like we’re describing two different methods of building this system.
Your ideas seems to depend on having many instances for various regions, where all instances are federated with each other. So my local instance somewhere in the US would still be federated with for example, an instance in Germany. But the content I receive would be heavily focused on “nearby” content. Interesting
My ideas are based on an important difference. An instance for my town would only federate with instances for the surrounding towns. Maybe one or two more “hops” away. So sharing content between my local instance and one in Germany would be impossible. Content on my local instance would only be accessible to users in nearby instances. Local content enforced by local federation.
Yes, what I’m describing is federating with all instances, unless of course, you decide to block one. Using the method I’ve described, there would be only one hop necessary from your local to the instance relevant to your location. I can’t picture the benefit of a solution in which you would only federate with local instances, given that the downside would be that you would be restricted to posting in your own location. Let me know if I’m missing something. I appreciate all of this feedback.
Build it yourself. Stash several mini computers connected to Lora radios around town. Connect to form a mesh all focused on the same fediverse page. Connect wifi hotspots to those servers, connecting phones to the hosted page, not to the internet.
You’d get a localized community site that by design can’t be infiltrated by people from across the country hating on you (e.g., San Francisco and Texas).
No idea on feasibility or how much work, but seems to address your question at least.
This is where I thought it was going and, the ideas needn’t be incompatible. If you went local (down to say a zip code/postcode) the individual resources required would be minimal. I wonder if people would be able to contribute a smidge of storage/bandwidth like they do with things like SETI. The local instance/mesh would essentially know your location and sign you up to the right one.
I think something like Nostr would work, as each user would be a node (some allowing broadcast and networking), so moving house or even going on holiday wouldn’t be an issue.
Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.
Thanks! I’ll take all the suggestions I can get! This is interesting, and something I’ve never really considered for any local project. Is it common for libraries to take an interest in online platforms like this? Which country do you live in by the way? I’m not sure if it’s a knowledge gap on my part or just something that libraries in the UK wouldn’t get involved with.
I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.
I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.
Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.
Thanks for this. I like the idea of local libraries being the hub of community connection. If I get a strong impression that people would want this, and if I get the impression that I can do a better job of building such a platform than anyone else willing to do so, I’ll be sure to contact my local library. At the moment, I’m still on the fence on both counts, given that I don’t believe the idea has yet garnered the attention of anyone who has experience developing for decentralised platforms. I’m hopeful though. It sounds like a fun project, but it would be a shame to get to the end of it without help and nobody actually wants it, or to work away at it and find something I’ve overlooked will prevent it from happening. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for a little while.
Yes, I would use this a lot! That’s an incredibly exciting idea and something that I think is desperately needed for the fediverse. I hate to say it, but I think this is something that other (currently more popular) platforms still have an advantage over.
As someone that travels for work, it’s not always easy for me to learn where and what my resources are. I could see a platform like this being able to help out immensely.
Buying/selling/donating groups are something that immediately comes to mind too.
It’s such a joy to read this kind of feedback, and to know that not only would it be enjoyable to have such a platform, but you can foresee that it would be useful. I think I might ask some developers who have experience with building decentralised platforms to see if they think there would be technical issues.
Absolutely! I’m no developer, but I’d be happy to give feedback or help any way that I can, just let me know. Keep us updated too!
Hey, you asked to be kept updated, so I thought I’d let you know that I have been working on Habitat: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
