What's a good federated social media that's less anonymous/more like facebook?
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".
Getting a critical mass of people to sign up for the service depends on having something to offer those people. In the case of Facebook, that offering was initially "this is where you can find your hot classmates" and subsequently "this is where the hot college students hang out".
I guess that's a good point. I might just have to be the one to go into some facebook groups I'm interested in and try to get people to move over to friendica or something