Exploring the idea of a decentralised social platform based on location.

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.

  • Hello_there
    8•1 month ago

    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.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
      5•1 month ago

      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.