Nobody on the Fediverse seems to have families.Sometimes if you read their profiles they claim to have families but then that claim is almost never reflected in what they post.Likewise, nobody seems to exist in political units at levels lower than the national.I believe that the Fediverse has become a waystation on our way to turning ourselves into bots, a way of rendering us ineffective in what we, with increasing derision, call "the real world".#SeizeTheMeansOfCommunity
I think your observation may have to do with privacy? If using a pseudonym one can't share too many details about their personal life or local area for fear of getting doxed, and if using one's real name there's the need to preserve the agency and privacy of the people close to you (I think the fediverse has so far followed Twitter as opposed to Facebook, in that most people are connected to a different, mostly virtual, social network with little overlap with the one they participate in physically, so it may feel strange to talk to about them with "strangers" rather than with them). In both cases, I think there's a tendency to compartmentalise one's public identity on social media and only post about certain topics. I hope Bonfire extensions like Topics and Circles & Boundaries (and Groups soon) can help address some of these. Not just as a technical "solution" but in meeting some unmet needs for more people and hopefully make federated social networking more integrated with the full spectrums of our social/political/economic/communal lives...
@mayel @bhaugen Mastodon users are abuse victims and ProtonMail was predating on these people before the v4.0 and removing their presence from the Fediverse. They probably don't want to talk about their families; in my personal case, I never wanted to blame mine for what happened to me (that was related to my transidentity, so not their fault, but I wasn't sure a few years ago). It's also still a gamified space with little more to offer than followers counts, leading to all sorts of gaslightings including the impossibility to criticize what's being gamified (i.e. what they associate with a quantitative feedback, be it followers, a paycheck, or experience points).
I was also thinking about maintaining a local Bonfire instance, but IMO you need to think beforehand about how you’ll handle the moderation, as people can’t go to an alternative form of your town; it could imply removing people from online social/political participation, even if it looks like an oxymoron.
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
Manual federation enabled