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I love this "local first" focus, which for me translates into "relevant first". My app Plantshare (posted about it in this HN post) is not very useful if you're the only user for 40km around, but I've seen local pockets of signups that gain momentum and are then useful in that locality and the users make local connections.

I think the biggest hurdle for this would be to gain traffic in place of an existing entrenched local Facebook group or similar.

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Yeah I think established Facebook groups are probably the biggest hurdle. To me, the benefits of not using Facebook are self evident, but a lot of people don't know about the issues around that or don't care. I think creating features that can't be achieved on Facebook could help. Outside of that, I think it's just a matter of providing meaningful content yourself. For Plantshare, I imagine it would be beneficial to be close to you because you, the developer of the app, presumably have a wide variety of plants because that's your interest. And if it's a success for you and your local community, you've succeeded, and any other pockets of success are a bonus. This is at least the way I'm looking at my project here. I still do intend to continue to work on the open source side of things though of course.

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