Fediverse

A federated Nextdoor or local Facebook group seems a great idea as it is clearly popular. My only issue is with dividing Home and Nearby by distance. That works well in ideal cases but can get weird in others.

So I live on the coast at the mouth of a big river. If I look up events near me they are done as the crow flies and it can offer up locations on the other side of the estuary. However, to get their by land involves a long U shaped journey through a tunnel, so what appears to be 5 minutes away is 30+ and of little interest to me.

Another example might be city vs country. In the city 5 miles would drag in a large population, in the country it might not even get you to the next village.

A better solution might be postcodes/zip codes (or equivalent) - they're usually designed to encompass similar population numbers, so change in size depending on population density. The data is also freely available (it is on OpenStreetMap, for example) and it should be easy enough to crunch through the data and create a database that defines the adjacent areas for a specific postcode (looking them over, it tends to be 5 or 6).

Other than that, I think the main issue would be getting enough people involved as a quiet feed would kill it dead.