Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have geo-based communities for that? Like ‘australian-politics’ or ‘seattle-news’? The functionality is already there it just isn’t being used.

I’m sorry I just really like Seattle and telling people about how great Seattle is.

As far as Lemmy is concerned, I just joined an instance that’s relevant to my location (feddit.uk). I suppose if it grew a great deal more popular than that, I could create a community there for my local county.

I should absolutely mention though that I’m still hard at work on Habitat, which is a platform for local communities, and each post has a lat/long location associated for a more hyperlocal type of interaction. It’s not on the Fediverse though (though there are plans for non-Fediverse federation).

Where did you see these posts? On the ALL post feed?

I doubt Lemmy will ever do this - e.g. moderator reports still don’t federate to other instances until the release of v1.0, despite the Rexodus having been several years in the past now. Basically any solution would have to be on top of the software without needing any changes within it. Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.

Although predictably PieFed already has this functionality, for well over a year now. For one it has hashtags, plus user and post flairs, and for another it has categories of communities where someone can look at e.g. news across all regions, or pick let’s say Europe and then choose from various sub-topics below that. Also, while these Topic areas are defined by the instance admins, the otherwise identical concept of topical Feeds are user-customizeable and even shareable, so someone has likely made what you are looking for already, but if not then you could make it and share with others to benefit from your efforts.

At worst even, say when interacting with existing communities that did not want to actively participate in the process of self-sorting their own content, users have keyword filters that can be used so that you as an end-user can do it entirely on your own. Such community discovery and management concerns are a solved problem on PieFed. I say this full well as someone who had the identical issue you described here when I was on Lemmy, and moving to PieFed solved it for me.

The developers are also extremely receptive to feedback, if you needed still more changes made to the code. I sincerely doubt that you will ever get a solution going using Lemmy - this identical (edit: general) concept has already been asked for many times over the years - but switching to PieFed should easily take care of it, offering multiple possibilities to make finding the content that you want easier.

I wanted to build an entire social network that was based on that a decade ago.

the globe would be segmented into “tiles” and you could see activity in that tile. each user would have their own smaller tile that would be used to gather posts within their bounds, so in essence you could see a customized view if you were between 2-6 other tiles.

I wanted to go further and allow paid services to post information across multiple tiles. for example, if you had a product and wanted to target the whole world, you’d have to pay the fee for each tile in the entire world. of course you could still filter them out and such.

businesses could purchase their own tile where you could see things like how busy they are, menus, reviews, etc. this was particularly interesting for places like art museums where I wanted users to be able to see more information about displays and be able to have discussions about them within the community.

I had high hopes for it.

and then trump won his first term and I stopped working on it because I lost all motivation.

edit: tbh, lemmy and federation social networks in general have given me some small motivation but nothing more than thinking about how awesome it would have been. I would have been done with it by now if I had continued.

What about privacy tho? If I want people to know what continent I’m on, I’ll say so.

i propose that each post has a (one or many) geo_tag fields that just link to the canonical wikipedia page about the place, for example,

{
  "post_id": 1543535,
  "geo_tags": [
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne"
  ],
  ...
}