I don’t share this thread’s ideas about making it accessible for everyone. I think people are too fixated on scale and inclusion.
It’s absolutely fine to work for three evening hours in a fixed timezone. Every timezone has enough people to not meet every one of them in a lifetime.
If someone wants this in their timezone, they can just llm-php it into existence. Or ask OP about sharing source codes.
Local communities all operate in the same time zone. No reason small online communities couldn’t operate in the same time zone, allowing each time zone to have their own separate communities.
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.
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
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.
Depends entirely upon the issue and the urgency. Hell, I'd wager we could all use a bit more patience and a bit less of everything being so instantaneous.
