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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of Mastodon and I'm glad it exists, but I've yet to find a particular niche for which there is a server where I want to participate. Usually these days I'll just stick to a Slack workspace, a Discord server, or a Facebook group if I want to engage with a community publicly, and I'm already off of Twitter altogether. I'm guessing it's just a cold start problem.

What the best way of discovering active Mastodon communities one might want to be part of?

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The server doesn't really matter. You need to start out with people you're following, then when they boost posts, check if the person who wrote the post is worth following. Over time, you'll build up a decent network of interesting people. I started just following @maia@crimew.gay, now 14 months and 3000 posts later I'm following 101 people and have made quite a few new friends.

Along these lines, how would folks feel about their local town/county/state running a Mastodon instance? It's a community you belong to, and it would create a sort of "digital public square" as opposed to the privatized walled gardens we have today.

Is something like this realistic?

I don't think most people would want unmoderated contact with their city. I am not joking.

Might as well hasten the apocalypse. Clips from town halls are some of my favorite shitshows to watch on YouTube as it is. Just imagine all the ways this will go wrong.

Servers still have moderators and admins. There are tools to moderate posts and accounts on the server, as well as how to federate with other servers.

From what I've seen on NextDoor (which is -kinda- moderated) as a lurker, we really don't want a town square online lol. You will like your neighbors way less. Too many people feel that having a strong opinion on a subject also makes them an expert on said subject.

And they really, really hate homeless people.

Nextdoor is the established social network for this. Like any social network it is pretty hard to overcome the first mover advantage. Anyone who wants a community like this will be on nextdoor, and you need need to get the whole neighborhood to move over. I guess you would end up with all the same toxic content, just on a new platform.

Nextdoor is possibly the only platform less intuitive than Mastodon, so it might have a chance.

Nextdoor is mostly people asking things like "did you hear that?" I get a daily digest and it's almost all totally worthless. I haven't unsubscribed so I can remain current on how useless it is for when somebody inevitably asks me about it.

Nextdoor is a very US thing. HN is literally the only place I've ever seen or heard it mentioned.

It's increasingly popular in the UK too, though most people still just use Facebook.

What you're describing is basically NextDoor, and in my experience the challenges involved in operating such a thing are beyond simply operating a mastodon instance. Imagine Twitter, except for local politics and less community moderation.

Yes. I am working on spinning up a local server for CSA(Community Supported Agriculture) in our area to connect farmers to consumer communities. The goal is to create connection, community, and bypass the current bottlenecks driving up food prices. Nextdoor is ripe to be disrupted too. The police love Nextdoor, but not me. The cheap and relatively easy way to spin up a server is with yunohost.org, but you can also do it really easily with a service like mastohost.

It's very realistic IMO. But just like local subreddits and FB groups, a lot of it comes down to having diligent and reasonable mods.

You echo my sentiments. It seems good discoverability is hard, so the path of least resistance is centralization!

Imo ideal would be like a plugin for Chrome that injects external content automatically into my Facebook and Twitter feeds. Can you imagine how awesome adoption could be? Your favorite account just got banned? Go look up their decentralized domain style uncensorable ID and bam seamlessly have at least one uncensored bit showing up on your bread and butter sites without having to change your habits much immediately.

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