cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160218
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160073
I've been working on Habitat for the past two years. It all stemmed from this idea that I posted in April 2024.
Habitat is a free open-source, self hosted social platform for local communities. It is aimed at fostering local community discussions and discovery of areas of interest. This is why it is built primarily around location. A Habitat instance centers on a specific area, and the local community can make generic posts about that area, or they can make posts about specific locations in that area. More about what I've been building and the future plans here.
Features
- Habitat specification of location and size - enabling posts related to the local area
- Home feed - Displays the most recent posts
- Nearby feed - Displays posts sorted by proximity to the user
- Create posts - Upload photos, set locations, comments
- Categories - Location rules
- Amazon S3 image storage option
- Personalisation - Overrides Habitat defaults per user: kms/miles, hidden categories
- Moderation tools - User, post, comment moderation, block email addresses
- Announcements - Scheduled announcements
- Public moderation log - Keep moderator actions visible for 30 days
If you're interest in this at all, please give it a spin and let me know how you get on. I'll keep an eye here on Lemmy, but you can also post to the Habitat discussion board on GitHub.
Oh wow this would be huge. The local sub is the main thing that keeps me coming back to Reddit.
However, it probably will take some local organizing to get it to fire in each area. Getting a critical mass for these is tough by just having randomly distributed global internet users join. Even with thousands of users, the California community on Lemmy is way less active than the sub for my city on Reddit.
Wow great comment. But I'd have to figure out who is going to host a local server first. I'm not super tech savvy personally, especially compared to Lemmings.
Yeah I think it's way beyond what I would know how to do... I've also got some pretty crazy things happening in my life right now so I'm not looking to take on any big projects at this time. Maybe when things are back to normal.
Or I'll ask around and see if anyone else is interested in doing it.
Could straight up petition the city to host the servers. It would have some interesting legal ramifications but it could help speed up adoption and also provide a full on town square thing, with actual city fundings.