This has been on my mind lately a lot with Nextdoor. I have really mixed feelings about Nextdoor which is a slightly separate issue, but it always seemed to me that something like Mastodon or maybe even SSB would be an ideal use case in the same space as Nextdoor. You could have local communities around local servers, that have some natural reason to organize about that (geography), but are still loosely federated.

I'm not sure where my thoughts are going, as I'm not exactly surprised Nextdoor has more use than a more decentralized system for this use, but it's salient to me as I'd think something like SSB or Mastodon would ideally occupy the space that Nextdoor is occupying. I'm not sure if it is highlighting the legwork that Nextdoor did to build up its userbase (physically mailing people in a community), or the lack of technical sophistication of users in general, or the relative infancy of Mastodon/SSB/etc, or something inherent about getting a foot in the door with decentralized stuff in terms of mindset, or some inherent limitations of decentralization (can you really just compel/convince people to use decentralized services? People just use them).

I'm trying to imagine, for example, local police posting to Mastodon about some local safety issue in the same way as on Nextdoor. With Nextdoor, it's something known nationally, the state probably gives them recommendations, they just post to Nextdoor. Nextdoor might have even reached out to them. With e.g., Mastodon, I suppose I could see it being recognized as a thing if use got up, but where are they posting? The local popular servers? Do they run their own police server? Some kind of city government server?

This isn't a criticism of decentralization -- I'd like to see everything more decentralized. I just think something like Nextdoor is an interesting case to me to think through these issues because Nextdoor is so localized, and it seems like that's kind of the ideal use case for decentralized services.