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!

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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?