Part of the Localism Network

A lot of large cities have their own Discord servers, but my friend has been wondering how many small towns and villages have them, or if maybe there are larger units like local counties that have them and have a channel for each town. She has her own Discord server where I'm a mod, and we were talking about the idea of establishing a geoconnection with it by adding a plethora of people from the local area. She therefore has been wondering if it would be easier if the villages in question have their own servers, since we could just have our server and the village server co-sponsor each other. The other way of doing it would be to go to some community wall or bulletin board and advertise the server, though that's not as effective as it might sound.

Should local communities strife to be self sufficient in everything or should they specialise and trade with those around them for what they don't't produce themselves?

Did anyone here read one of these books: Leopold Kohr - breakdown of nations & Ernst Schumacher - Small is beautiful

I watched a documentary about Leopold Kohr on YouTube last year and really liked most of his ideas. And since I’m just ordering some books, i wanted to know if someone here did read one of the books and what’s your opinion on it.

From Chapter 8, "The Efficiency of Small":

In a small-state world, motor-cars were not needed. The satisfaction we desire in our travels is not the spanning of distances for the sake of distance but for the sake of extracting pleasure from the variety of different experiences which each different region and habit offers us. What we want from travel is adventure, not cars. The small-state world, being also a small-scale world, gave us all the excitement of vast space travel with the difference that we could find it all near by. A journey of fifty miles surprised the voyager with an almost infinite variety of new vistas and heretofore unknown experiences. Walking along, he would meet adventures, couriers, brigands, merchants, monks, and lords, and since they could not flit by in seventy-mile speeds as they do today, he not only would meet but also get to know them. He passed smoky smithies and stately inns. He passed vineyards and tin-mines. Each different city was a new world to him, with different customs, architectures, laws, and princes. The conversation with customs officials alone gave him more information than the reading of a dozen modern travel books whose main interest incidentally is that they still guide one occasionally through the remnants of former times. On a fifty-mile trip he passed through worlds, and learned about new products and devices he had never known before. And to sally forth into the unknown space for a distance of fifty miles required neither aeroplanes nor motor-cars.

To extract similar satisfactions from a large-area world, we must now travel not fifty but thousands of miles. To do this, we indeed need cars and planes, and speeds of a hundred miles per hour or more. But what do they give us in experience? Almost nothing. If we travel three thousand miles from New York to Los Angeles, we find the same kind of city on which we have just turned our back. If we go to the village of Hudson, one of the most northern places along the Canadian National Railway hewn out of the wilderness of virgin forests, and walk into a restaurant, we find the same sort of place we have just left behind in Brooklyn. Things that might be different, we have passed by because our super highways have been smoothed and straightened to such an extent that we no longer can afford to lose time by driving slowly. We may race up and down the entire North American continent and see nothing but Main Street all over again, filled with the same kind of people, following the same kind of business, reading the same kind of funnies and columnists, sharing the same movie stars, the same thoughts, the same laws, the same morals, the same convictions. This is why, if we want to read really exciting adventure stories nowadays, we have to fall back on Homer or Stevenson who crammed into their journeys of a few hundred miles more fascinating incidents than our modern cartoonists whose spaceships, travelling with many times the speed of light, lead us to distant stars in distant galaxies only to find what? That Kilroy had already been there, leaving a copy of the Constitution and a can of the beer that made Milwaukee famous.

If in several European vast-area states such as Italy, France, or Germany, so many exciting though rapidly dwindling differences are still experienced on relatively short journeys, it is because the medieval small-state diversity has left so lasting an imprint that no unifying process has as yet been able to wipe it out. Ironically, the largest single source of income of some of these advanced big-area states is often not found in their giant industry in which they take such pride, but in the money left them by tourists coming to enjoy the old-world charms and comforts created not by them but their ‘backward’ little predecessors. However, soon these last refuges of former small-scale living will be swallowed up by the impending further improvements of our travel and transportation means. Being able to span distances still faster, it will become uneconomical as well as impossible to stop anywhere except at hamburger stands along the roads, and in the terminal towns of the big autostradas from which every difference will have disappeared for ever. And with it will be gone the purpose of all travel.