I had a chat with @darius based on interesting toot on how “local only” posting contributes to community vitality, and Darius mentioned planning an extension to Hometown to add support for “Neighborhoods”. Very interesting concept, and related to this topic:
Friend Camp has about 50 active users and I just noticed we have more than half a million posts here since August 2018! I mean that’s 11 a day per person on average but still. That seems wild to me.
Last I checked something like 75% of our posts are unfederated. That’s still 125 thousand posts sent to the fediverse. I think local-only posting increases the vitality of community, increasing the volume of overall activity, and contributing more to the fediverse than a less vital instance would.
In other words: if Friend Camp never had local only posting, we would not have cohered as a community, and we would have contributed far less to the fediverse as a whole than we do with the ability to post unfederated.
Here is the a GH gist outlining the Neighborhood idea:
Hometown Neighborhoods
I am now working on a third layer of communication: a medium-trust layer. This layer (which is actually pretty high trust as far as these things go) is called a “neighborhood”. Let’s say that the users of coolpeople.social have decided that the users of awesomepeople.social are really amazing and they want to share more with them. The coolpeople and the awesomepeople mutually decide to join a “neighborhood”, which means that neighborhood-level posts on either server can be seen by everyone on both servers.
This means that when you make a post on Hometown there will be three choices in a little dropdown toggle:
- local (just the people on your server)
- neighborhood (just the people on your server and a small group of other servers)
- federated (the whole world)
[…] I do plan to publish neighborhoods as a specification.