Federation has always been in the plan. Success for an individual instances is all the matters to any given owner, not success globally. The owner of an instance must have a vested interest in fostering their local community.

Is it really a replacement if there aren't crazy people ranting about their neighbors while drunk?

However, it probably will take some local organizing to get it to fire in each area. Getting a critical mass for these is tough by just having randomly distributed global internet users join.

Maybe one strategy here is to promote it at universities? That’s how Facebook got a critical mass before opening it up to the general public. People would join if other people from their school are on it, and its much easier to achieve critical mass at a university than a city at large.

You could start with the compsci students, who might appreciate it for the merits of the ActivityPub protocol. From there, you could branch out to other departments. Hopefully this will create enough activity to make it an attractive place to join for the city at large.

Once you get enough people on there, you could reach out to local politicians (eg city councillors) and ask them to join. If they join then hopefully they promote their account at least once on their mainstream normie social media like X, which will hopefully attract a few users from there.

Hanging flyers around the city with a QR code is another option. I know in my city people do that to promote a local Discord for cyclists. That Discord is very active.

Asking for a call out on local email newsletters is also a helpful possibility. I know a separate urbanists Discord group in my city that has got a fair amount of users from their email mailing list, which they’ve picked up just from a signup form on their local website as far as I’m aware.

Promotion on your local FB group or subreddit is also a very viable option.

If you live in a small community, then you can’t beat word of mouth.

Anyway, there are strategies! I have hope. Let’s make this a thing.

Unless you live in my home town, it's highly unlikely that there are any other instances yet. From a practical point of view, until I build in federation, it's a matter of literal word of mouth between people of a community. Once it's federated, the nearby tab will show you your closest instance.

This is my local instance: https://www.irthlingborough.net/

I'm still going! It's been my weekend obsession for two years!

It's distributed -- you'll need to create an instance for your own area. To do so, take a look at the getting started section: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started

More information of what it is and how it's planned to be in the future is in my previous blog posts:

• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/
• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/