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.