I haven't, but I will absolutely look at this on the weekend! Thanks so much

Thanks for this! 😃 I have been going back and forth on the idea of providing the end user with the ability to create their own categories. I was wondering whether it would be better to have an Other type category which the admin can react to and create categories as needed, but your post has pushed me back to the idea of allowing category creation. I think if I do implement that, I'll have a switch for it, so that the instance admin can choose.

Ha! Funnily enough I just responded to a different comment along these same lines: that's the beauty of the fediverse. If a community of moaners exist, they could have their own instance. Or in the case of Lemmy (and the very theoretical Habitat), their own categories that other users can tune out from. I think you're going to have places in which moderation is a success and places in which it isn't. Anything that isn't moderated appropriately and gets taken down as a result of something actually illegal won't affect the communities that are appropriately moderated, because it can all be separated. It seems to be working well enough for Lemmy.

I can't seem to find anything relevant when I search for Topix, but I think we learn to moderate our local communities effectively. Just like here on Lemmy. The difference being that owners will have fewer people to moderate, so it should in theory be easier. If an owner is vile, create a competing instance.

Thanks for this. I really appreciate (and enjoyed!) the use cases. What I have in mind is mostly the information sharing use case. I think there's been a lot of focus on such a platform "catching on" and what it means on the global scale, and I did get caught up in that for a brief moment, but I've realised that my interest on the global scale is misplaced. I want something that primarily works for a local community, and I want it to be decentralised in a fashion so that if instances decide to acknowledge each-other's existence, they'll provide the ability to look for physically close posts by pointing to each other when relevant. This might not be how the rest of the Fediverse works, or want's to work, but it seems better and actually simpler in design to me. I think I'm going to go off and try building my own thing. If nothing else, it'll be a learning experience.

The Hometown functionality isn't what I'm describing. I want something in which the experience is about physical proximity to the subject. I may be bad at explaining this. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Hey, you're the second person to suggest that it could be achieved with Mastodon. I'll look into it, and if it can be achieved with Mastodon in the way that I'm picturing, I won't be reinventing the wheel, thanks.

Hey, I've been looking into the idea of using population density as an indicator of how big a community should be, but it didn't feel right that the platform would be deciding the boundaries of each community. I then thought about the idea that the owner, upon setup, would draw a shape on a map that would indicate the boundaries of their desired community. How do you feel that solution would that solution work around your river?

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.

fear that every country might have it's own unique problems, but I'll look into postcodes, thanks.

Is that a matrix address? I don't know what this is, I'll look into it. Thanks for the feedback. It isn't quite how I envision it but it sounds like a lot of people are in favour of local communities, and it appears we don't have a solution on the fediverse for that yet.