I just posted a message about a weather report about some snow that we're going to be getting here in #Ottawa, and I used #hometown's very convenient "local only" feature–the main reason that we're running this fork of Mastodon.
By marking a post as local-only, it doesn't federate–it's only visible to users on our instance, https://ottawa.place. The combination of a regionally-focused instance and local-only posting means that I can post stuff like this that applies to Ottawa, without worrying about cluttering up the feeds of my followers that are elsewhere.
Local-only posts and Hometown are one of the main reasons that I'm excited about growing region-specific instances! It means that we can have a nice community here, but still keep in touch with friends, followers, colleagues, etc. from across the wider #fediverse
@andrew but then only ottawans on your local instance can see it and ones that are on others (like myself) can't. Do I to choose your instances moderators and infra to engage in my phyaically local community? Multi account setups make this easier I suppose 🤔
@andrew I think this means that the fediverse is in need of a "private groups" feature in general that's not just tied to instances and the instance moderators. E.g. a private group can span many instances and have cross-instance moderation for adding and removing members. 🤔
It would probably not be a mastodon feature but a new fedi-capable system.
