It's one of the main things I miss about BBSs. I've thought about trying to start a BBS that requires a low ping, using the speed of light to encourage locality.

Expensive long-distance phone calls sucked, but the side-effect was that nearly everybody on a given board was in the same or one-adjacent local calling area. They were strangers behind a screen only to a degree; they were also your neighbors, schoolmates, and coworkers. If someone needed something, someone else could bike or drive over and help. We had parties, we had picnics, we organized camping weekends. They didn't stay strangers for long.

Yes the global internet was big and shiny and it let you talk to anyone anywhere. So far away that they might in fact be a dog, and you'd never know. But for all we gained, we lost that sense of local connection, and I didn't appreciate that aspect until it was gone.

My guess is the locality helped with civility, we wouldn't call anyone offensive names if there's a chance we run into them "IRL".

Then again the drama of Nextdoor communities probably means this is largely dead...

The time zone restriction does nothing to keep out people who live far north or south of you, but does keep out people far east or far west.

Unless you live in Indiana, Idaho, Oregon, or parts of Florida

Could you please explain?

All of the (continental) US is in similar enough timezones, that whatever 3 hour window is convenient for one part is still easily accessible for the others.

Those are all states that have multiple timezones for the same longitude. Travel North or South and you change time zones.

You can also add Arizona to the list, but for only part of the year, as Arizona and the Hopi nation do not follow daylight savings time, but the Navajo nation, which fully surrounds the Hopi, does

Sure, but an hour or even three here or there aren't gonna make much of a difference.

Those small shifts don't transform a convenient time into 4am.

This was in response to a comment up thread about making it limited to people in the same time zone, an imposed limitation rather than a self arising onr

If you are traveling and need to deal with something that happens at home, too bad. There are plenty of timezones that make it quite difficult to manage, especially if they have phone wait times that exceed 30min.

> [...] especially if they have phone wait times that exceed 30min.

Sorry, what does that mean? What are phone wait times, and what do they have to do with time zones?

> No reason small online communities couldn’t operate in the same time zone

For example, Finland, Romania, Turkey and South Africa are on the same time zone.

It’s a late stage feature for a social media app. Initially you need anyone and everyone on the site.