To re-iterate, every place gets their own separate room. You must be physically in a place to join their chatroom.
Some of you never opened Telegram’s “local” section, and it shows.
It’s all just sex and drugs
We have a local meshtastic network set up for just this scenario. There’s not s lot of chatter, though.
Telegram used to have these local public chat rooms that anyone could see or join. The common topics were:
- Pokémon go
- Offers to sell sex
- Offers to sell drugs
But I guess Pokémon go is out if there’s no internets.
I bet things would pick up in a no internet scenario.
Cities’ chatrooms would probably look like faceook city groups atm, with at least a little diversity. But rural town chatrooms would be filled with racism and propaganda, and it would be a pure echochamber.
TrueMAGAPatriot67: Looking 4 cry5tal meet me bhind dumpster at wendys by home depot
Unmoderated?
Spam and shitposts top to bottom.
People selling drugs
Maybe like 4chan. No usernames, just a big mix, to make surveillance more difficult. There might be some ephemeral tracking (data retained no more than 5 minutes) to separate the participants in threaded conversations and to throttle stuff like spam floods. With luck the locality requirement would be enough to stop it turning from a 4chan-like cesspit. I didn’t know about imageboard systems when they were happening and before they became awful, but they sound in retrospect like they were cool as hell, better than what we have now.
There are a few Fediverse projects trying to recreate them: https://delightful.club/delightful-fediverse-apps/#media-hosting
Kinda sounds like you are describing AOL
LOL this is from ChatGPT in my city:
A local city - Community Chatroom
Thread: The Great Potato Rain of 2025 - What is happening?
FresnoLocal99: “Okay, I’m just gonna say it. Is anyone else seeing potatoes fall from the sky right now? Am I losing my mind?” (Attached image: A potato bouncing off their car windshield)
TaterLover23: “YES! It’s like someone opened a potato floodgate! I’ve got mashed potatoes coming out of my garden hose! 😱”
SpudnikFresno: “I just got hit in the head by one while I was watering my plants. I thought a bird dropped a rock on me. Are we sure this isn’t some sort of bizarre Fresno tradition I missed?”
FresnoLocal99: “I honestly thought I was being attacked by a bird with a really bad aim. I’ve got a potato lodged in my gutters now. How am I supposed to explain this to my neighbors?”
