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Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place? (carlnewton.github.io)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

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

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.

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

I’m generally not a big fan of big social media like e.g. Facebook where you might have many thousands of followers, purposefully grow the numbers, etc. I personally think these things are an everyday evil. Yes, it’s a bit melodramatic 🙂but that’s how I feel. Reddit, and now Lemmy are about as far as I like to go with it.

So the isolation of geo-local-only federation is a feature. The feature, actually. I want an entire social media platform that isn’t capable of focusing on single accounts. Where you are near guaranteed to interact with your local community only. Where it would take a dramatic effort for a single actor to influence global opinions. I want a social media platform that isn’t so easy to manipulate. I could go on and on.

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

Hey, thanks for this. I think I want the same. I don't think the idea of being able to follow a profile to see what else someone has posted, or to even be able to private message someone on the platform. The focus being only the place of interest.