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@da5nsy Even catching local things on the scale of metropolitan area on the Fediverse takes significant work. Unless population is especially dense or there is an extraordinary proliferation of Fediverse users where you are anything more granular than that just won't find people because they are not on the Fediverse to find. This compounds with a lot of people not wanting to reveal their location except when they explicitly want to. So ... hashtags using a place's name are usually good if used.

@Matt5sean3
I agree (not many people, many don't want to share location, hashtags can be good), but I think it's a shame that there will be some missed connections due to different scaling - let's say one person tags #London and another person tags #Hackney (a borough in the city of London). Should there not be some sort of link between those two concepts? I would like the option to be able to follow a version of "#London" that includes all the possible sub-units of #London (for example)

@Matt5sean3 Something like this: https://social.coop/@da5nsy/110885109717922739

@da5nsy I'm not sold on the exact implementation, but if clients could implement a way to relate tags that would help a bit. For example, if a Mastodon client knew #RVA and #Cville are places in #Virginia that would give potential for better features when querying about places. As it is, Mastodon doesn't really even know those are places. Any system of hashtag metadata could go a long way.

@da5nsy That would be somewhat a shortcoming, but a few false positives are not the end of world. Besides that, recognizable slug names can help. #Fredericksburg could be a lot of places, but #FXBG is in Virginia. People also append VA to hashtags to disambiguate as necessary anyway because this is a shortcoming intrinsic to hashtags.

@Matt5sean3
Sure. Without an agreed protocol each of those slug names would need to develop organically, and that doesn't scale down to tiny locations.
Like, in [this example](https://social.coop/@da5nsy/110884568742669188), would I create a new hashtag for the street? Which street? The park? Would I tag the tiny village? Or the general area?

@da5nsy

Region is probably the most relevant given the proportion of people on the Fediverse. The whole of #Devon has ~1.2 million people, which is about the lower bound for a place to make sense to subscribe to a hashtag of it on the Fediverse unless it's a significant tourist destination.

If absolutely everybody used the Fediverse, I might agree with you, but right now there just aren't enough people on the Fediverse that more granular location tagging is much more useful.

@Matt5sean3 Like I said, I think a system which allows for subsets of varying granularity would be a neat alternative solution