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Reddit tended to have a pervasive assumption that everyone was American. I like the idea of engaging in location specific communities.

I mean, this is literally already happening.

Midwest.social

Feddit.de

Feddit.it

Feddit.nl

Sopuli.xyz

It's early days, but there are already localised instances popping up

I'm not against local oriented communities, but the hub and spoke model looks like centralisation with extra steps to me. I prefer decentralisation.

My personal opinion is that federation doesn't have to take any particular form, and the shape of the fediverse - or, rather, your particular fediverse or your pocket of federated space - depends on how communities decide to federate, informed by various factors including software implementation, community culture and values, moderation policies, etc. It could look like a lot of different things, and there's not really any "correct" policy with respect to federation; it's all subjective and values-based.

Now, as a manner of my preference, I do like envisioning the fediverse as a ball-and-stick model. I don't really like the idea of having 'main' or 'central' instances where everyone congregates, with smaller communities left on the fringe. To me, the kind of fediverse (or section of it) that I would most like to participate in is one where people are scattered across a diverse variety of instances - a wide range of stances on how they wish to federate: instances who federate with nobody and exist as isolated nodes, instances who federate with everybody and act like bridges or hubs, instances who federate with certain instances based on similar interests or values, constellations of instances which only touch in certain parts, etc. Each of varying size and user composition.

A lot of Mastodon, Calckey, Pleroma, etc. instances and a couple of Lemmy instances have already gotten to work on creating instances which are closely related to particular regions or locales. There's pnw.zone for the US Pacific Northwest, I follow the founder of alaskan.social (for Alaskans, obviously), mastodon.com.pl for Poland, calckey.nz for New Zealand, mastodon.ph for Filipinos, lemmy.pt for Portugal and Portuguese speakers, baraza.africa (Lemmy) for Africans and the African diaspora, etc. etc. On that aspect of your post, I'm highly supportive, and I think you should definitely give it a shot and seek out like-minded people in and around Tucson.

The fediverse may not/probably won't fully embrace the form of a locally-focused web (I know for some, local politics suck and they seek the internet as an escape from that), but something like that can and should exist in parallel with the interest-based and general purpose instances which already exist, and I would like to see things be further enmeshed through that.

I saw your other post in the support section a couple hours ago and tried to find an answer I'd come across earlier, but failed.
On that topic, if I remember correctly, Beehaw and a lot of other instances follow a three tiered block list that a group maintains, which each of the three levels containing the level before it. I couldn't find that list again, but I expect someone will chime in before too long.

I've found the mods here are quite active and helpful, albeit presumably busy as hell currently.

If they don't chime in soon, they might be more open to offering advice when things are less chaotic.

I think you've got a neat idea, and I hope it pans out.

I think it could be a good idea. Personally, I'm not much interested in a local specific online forum. I've used Nextdoor before and it feels a little too close to me, too much of a location specific echo chamber. That may be because I'm not in a larger town though 😅 I could definitely see some desire for it though.

We've had a lot of success with that model on mastodon, as well as the sort of hub-and-spoke model where you have a larger instance (like beehaw) and a number of smaller instances that primarily interact with the larger instance and with each other. Location specific instances are also great for discussion, for telling people about events in their area, etc.

You could always start pretty small - basically if you could get enough people who want to have a Tuscon-specific community and who can be active, you could start a solid community, and probably survive off of relatively small donations at first. Once you've got a solid seed community it could be easier to grow from there.

I personally run (with a friend) a mastodon instance which is only for me and people we know IRL. While it's not what you want in the long term, it could be a good starting place while you figure out how to get everything set up and figure out how many resources you'll need and what funding you'd need. That way you don't have to solve every problem at once - you can open it up more once you're sure you have a solid foundation.