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?
I think that would be friendica. I haven't tried it but it uses the ActivityPub protocol so you should even be able to interact with lemmy and mastodon.
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".
Jimmy Page Wales has been working on a beta of trust cafe. It's not federated yet but he's open to the idea. It's still pretty small and sleepy, don't go there yet. I like it the way it is for now. My best shit gets 8 upvotes lol