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Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?
(carlnewton.github.io)
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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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I agree that physical colocation of users is important for cohesive social media, but I don't think this is how it should be done. I also don't think it could ever take off.
People also want to participate in larger stuff sometimes (national news, international news). I think honestly the reddit model has already showed us how to handle this - just split stuff into separate communities.
You can have communities for the local stuff and people can go there. You can have communities for the bigger stuff and people can also go there if they want and they don't even need to make another user on another platform or anything.
I think honestly we just need more lemmy users to join instances that match their physical location. That's part of why I made Feddit.dk, to serve as the Danish hub of the Fediverse. We have communities for each city and you could have for each town as well once there's enough users to warrant that.
I tried a smaller Lemmy server first and it didn't meet my needs.
I used reddit in two specific but different ways:
About a dozen subreddits that I would visit individually. Small Lemmy instances work fine for this. Just subscribe to the ones I care about
Browsing r/all, taking in whatever was popular at any given moment. This only works on big Lemmy instances with wildly diverse federation.
I love the firehose of "what bizarre things bubbled to the top today? Oh snap, there's a scandal in the professional bowling community. This Farscape meme is hilarious even without context. Wow, look at that crazy picture of an owl riding another owl riding a bear" or whatever.
There was never enough content on small Lemmy servers to satisfy that itch. But scrolling the main feed on lemmy.world is good enough
I don't think the instances needs to be that big to have enough networking effect to get most of all comms. Feddit.dk for instance is relatively small but the all feed is basically identical to any other major instance.
Certainly a very small instance could have a temporary issue like this but it could be easily improved by just fetching the missing comms. And again, you can certainly find smaller instances than lemmy.world that still have all the stuff in the all feed.
While you may be correct, that was my experience. As a new user, I joined two Lemmy instances, was unsatisfied with the full feed on both, and said "screw it, I'm going to the biggest server".
The problem with telling people they can fetch the missing comms are threefold:
It becomes a perpetual maintenance task. New communities are being created all the time and I don't want to have to reference other servers' feeds regularly to stay up to date on the newest stuff. I might as well just be on that other server
Part of the joy of the firehose is seeing when some completely obscure community has a wildly popular post that one time because it's extra funny or shocking or whatever. Those posts just won't make it to most smaller servers.
It's an "unknown unknowns" problem. Sometimes you know what it is that you don't know and can go find it. But often I don't know which things I don't know, so I can't seek it out to add to my server. The beauty of a big server is that I don't have to do that legwork or even think about it.
All it takes is one user on the server subscribing to the Western Spotted Bull Frogs community for me to see it when they have a post blow up. The chances of one such user being on my server go way up here on lemmy.world. I'm sure there are smaller servers that are "good enough" in that regard. But why would I bother when I have what I want right here?
Not trying to be argumentative, just calling out what I see as a fundamental truth about Lemmy, compared to other fediverse applications. Like, on mastodon a big server's fedirated feed is more or less unreadable. That makes smaller servers appealing as it helps prioritize what makes it into the feed. On Lemmy, the voting system does that prioritization, removing one of the big reasons to avoid larger servers in the first place :)
I agree that this is a problem and Lemmy could do better at community discovery. It just feels inefficient to fetch all new communities all the time, but maybe some auto-fetching in case of popular posts should happen? I'm not sure how exactly to solve this problem.
That's actually a GREAT idea.
Server admins should be able to opt-in to pulling in the top N posts per hour/day/week from connected instances. Could even have an option like "if a community shows up more than X times this way, subscribe the server to that community", and then toss all that stuff into Discover section or something.
Hey! Thanks for the feedback! :D Regarding your point on whether or not it could ever take off, I've given this some thought over the last 24 hours, because I have received a lot of similar feedback. Initially it was one of the biggest things preventing me from wanting to actually attempting building it. I've come to the conclusion that if I can foster a community around it in my local area only, that would be a success for me. The nearby functionality would still work at a local level. If it grew from there, that would be even more of a success. I think with any network that's designed to be fragmented like this, there's always going to be places in which it doesn't take off or not enough people adopt it, but that shouldn't really affect whether or not it's a success at the local scale. So I've decided not to let that factor deter me.
I see your point on just using, let's say, an instance of Lemmy for my local town. This is a fair point, the solution might already be out there, but it uses a toolset that's designed for generic conversation, and not conversation around a location -- like, perhaps a specific location that I want to see or place on a map and talk about it. This is the functionality that I'm personally craving.
Best of luck :)
It kind of does work though, Jodel is already a thing and its all location based and getting users close to each other to interact.