. Last tended to <ahref='https://code.incremental.social/thepaperpilot/pages/commit/9aa6bf46bfd132527bed478007a37223f4f29de6'title='Thu Nov 28 22:01:32 2024 -0600'><timeclass='dt-updated'datetime='Thu Nov 28 22:01:32 2024 -0600'>2024-11-28</time></a>
.</span></p><hr><details><summary>Referenced by:</summary><ahref="/garden/no-politics-rules/index.md">"No Politics" Rules</a><ahref="/garden/chromatic-lattice/index.md">Chromatic Lattice</a><ahref="/garden/decentralized-moderation/index.md">Decentralized Moderation</a><ahref="/garden/filter-bubbles/index.md">Filter Bubbles</a><ahref="/garden/social-media/index.md">Social Media</a><ahref="/garden/virality/index.md">Virality</a></details><p>A locality is a physical area or neighborhood where people live and regularly see each other. In the same way I believe strong <ahref="/garden/local-communities/">Local Communities</a> are highly important in real life, I think <ahref="/garden/social-media/">Social Media</a> would benefit from having <em>digital</em> localities.</p><p>A digital locality will have a higher concentration of recognition between its members, leading to more meaningful relationships. This is achieved by operating similar to a physical neighborhood, where you're able to "look outside" and perhaps see a couple neighbors quite regularly, but with additional effort you can always "walk" further and further out to see a larger variety of people, and similarly others may "walk" to find you. This makes individual reach rely on a gradient of effort, keeping influence spread thin.</p><p>The motivations behind digital locality are aligned with the findings of Dunbar and his research on the cognitive limit for how many people we can maintain meaningful relationships with. He discusses his research and how it's held up over the years in <ahref="https://theconversation.com/dunbars-number-why-my-theory-that-humans-can-only-maintain-150-friendships-has-withstood-30-years-of-scrutiny-160676"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">this article</a>.</p><h2id="important-aspects"tabindex="-1">Important Aspects <aclass="header-anchor"href="#important-aspects"aria-label="Permalink to "Important Aspects""></a></h2><h3id="porosity"tabindex="-1">Porosity <aclass="header-anchor"href="#porosity"aria-label="Permalink to "Porosity""></a></h3><p>The most important aspect of digital locality should be that one's neighborhood has no discrete walls, only continuous gradients. For example, if our goal was merely small communities where you see the same people regularly, any small discord server would fit the bill. But in discord if you want to reach out to "nearby" users, you have to join an entire new discord server. In other words, communities on discord are not "porous", letting users freely "leak" between each other. The neighborhood metaphor for digital locality would mean having no discrete walls around any community, thus being fully "porous". This allows you to more easily expand your network and meet people with whom to form meaningful relationships.</p><h3id="decentralization"tabindex="-1">Decentralization <aclass="header-anchor"href="#decentralization"aria-label="Permalink to "Decentralization""></a></h3><p>A large motivation behind this concept is spreading influence thin. In the same way digital locality directly opposes the centralization of influence in the hands of the few, it opposes all sorts of centralization. Centralized ownership and moderation over the network leaves it vulnerable to <ahref="/garden/enshittification/">Enshittification</a> and <ahref="https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2023/01/the-digital-town-square-problem.html"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">other problems</a>. In practice, this means such a network should be <ahref="/garden/decentralized/">Decentralized</a>, ideally built on something like the <ahref="/garden/fedi-v2/">Agentic Fediverse</a>.</p><p>Social media must be moderated, which means a network with digital locality will need <ahref="/garden/decentralized-moderation/">Decentralized Moderation</a>. There's several approaches discussed there, but ultimately the way digital locality works should overall mean users are significantly less
