Product

Does anybody know a social network with focus on enabling small(-ish, as in thousands not millions), local communities, around a particular shared interest?

A leader, coach, staff engineer, product builder, philosophy graduate, travel enthusiast, video games and cinema lover.

Ex-Fb, ex-Spotify, ex-Ceramic Protocol

Hmmm, interesting requirements. A shared platform with no, or minimal, global space that has custom gating that specifies around locality?

Like Nextdoor with sub-channels and no public feed?

Decentralizing infrastructure with Kleomedes |

Building collaboration with Nearchos |

/octant Community Grants Council |

/colinks-and-co CoDAO Council

We had products like this in central/Eastern Europe but they were swallowed by fb, lack of scalable business model and the narrative that “it doesn’t make sense to make local products in the internet”.

Yeah that's why I wonder if approaches like using channels on Farcaster is more effective.

You can build a front end on top of Farcaster that further isolates the channel into more of a community.

Gotta find users where they already are. Adding yet another platform gets overwhelming.

I think you nailed it with both these posts.

I see Impact DAOs as the changing force here. But what's holding them back is a lack of tooling to coordinate ppl. But it solves the monetization and network effect issue.

Just need the platform, like you started with.

This is actually my focus on web3: DAO  tooling.

Or maybe it’s rather the case that the use cases and monetization of social media as we know them are focused on network effects, which make no sense in a local setting.

It's the SF effect, I'm guessing. Farcaster is a local product for the community developing it. If it starts to gain traction I'd imagine that'll change, but you're right. That's a hurdle it faces.

I really like Farcaster and channels. But it also clear to me that it’s dominated by a very US-centric crowd, probably more on the west coast and mid west, if I had to guess.

Social media are pretty well known at this point to create bubbles around extreme global social or political issues.

I’m curious if that means that means that there are no local use cases for social media around solving problems for particular communities.

I get the “approach users where they are approach”, but I also think that in social media space the culture created by early adopters can influence a lot who ends up being active on a given platform.