I’m looking for something where I can do some local community building, I’m guessing mastodon might work but I think the ideal is something like facebook where I can join a group tied to a common idea and a location, as well as being a bit more personal. Is there anything like that?
Facebook started out as a stalker/creeper site at Harvard, based on the model of the printed “face books” that colleges distributed with photos & names of students — which other students sometimes used to find sexy classmates.
It then expanded to other US colleges & universities, before opening to the general public.
This gave it an initial user base that was young, rich, & sexually active.
It’s that, not the technology, which is difficult to replicate “in the wild”.
We saw the social network too
I didn’t. I was working in IT at a college when Facebook launched, and they sent email spam to all my users.
Yeah, I was one of the students at those first dozen colleges when it rolled out.
fortunately I’m not trying to replicate young, rich and sexually active lol, I’m moreso interested in finding people near me with similar goals
Getting a critical mass of people to sign up for the service depends on having something to offer those people. In the case of Facebook, that offering was initially “this is where you can find your hot classmates” and subsequently “this is where the hot college students hang out”.
If you want to start a group with old, poor, and ugly then sign me up!