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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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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