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.

all 37 comments

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[–] bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 51 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Nice! An actual replacement to Nextdoor.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is it really a replacement if there aren't crazy people ranting about their neighbors while drunk?

[–] bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 month ago

pours drink Game on.

[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Is there a sample instance so we can see it in action?

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is my local instance: https://www.irthlingborough.net/

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

So I notice one bit of missing information: where is that place?

Besides curiosity, there's also the practical question of whether it's the right one to sign up for:
Say I encounter one named "Springfield" - how would I know which of the 93 (in the US alone) it is?

I propose having a map on the About page showing the area covered, with the ability to zoom out and see which state/province/etc, which country, and which continent.

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 15 points 1 month ago

Thanks for this. I hadn't considered it but it seems like a really obvious thing now you've said it .. testament to a good idea I think! I'll add it.

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hey, thanks again. Just to let you know, the map on the about page is in the latest release 1.1.0.

[–] davidgro@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You're welcome... But it doesn't appear to be zoomable? At least not in Firefox on Android

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

Yeah I'll be making some changes to it at some point.

[–] ThisOne@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This is very cool. But I'm thumb fingered idiot.

How can I check and see if anyone in my area had started an instance I can join?

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unless you live in my home town, it's highly unlikely that there are any other instances yet. From a practical point of view, until I build in federation, it's a matter of literal word of mouth between people of a community. Once it's federated, the nearby tab will show you your closest instance.

[–] ThisOne@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Gotcha, well I'll keep an eye out down the road. Good luck!

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

Thank you!

[–] Lawnman23@piefed.social 6 points 1 month ago

Cool!

[–] WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Where can I get more info on this, like how to join?

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

It's distributed -- you'll need to create an instance for your own area. To do so, take a look at the getting started section: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started

More information of what it is and how it's planned to be in the future is in my previous blog posts:

[–] WolfmanEightySix@piefed.social 3 points 1 month ago

Thanks mate. I’ll look at that tomorrow.

[–] Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org 4 points 1 month ago

This would be great - if there was a Discord/Meetup-style instance so that it could be started for free and communicate with other local communities. As is, I can't justify the cost, or the time. Plus, I'm in a densely packed area, and each group would want their own space. So as of now, this can't be a Meetup killer.

[–] MxRemy@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I remember that post!! Really cool to see that you ran with it, I'd love for this to catch on

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

I'm still going! It's been my weekend obsession for two years!

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

has nothing to do with the fediverse, as it is a centralized, non-federated platform
services like that will never be successful, unfortunately. Social platforms only work if enough people you know use it. But you will never know it in the first place, as individual owners lack the proper marketing to spread around the word.

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 5 points 1 month ago

Federation has always been in the plan. Success for an individual instances is all the matters to any given owner, not success globally. The owner of an instance must have a vested interest in fostering their local community.

[–] sl007@digitalcourage.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@carlnewton
Awesome. It seems that you and @benpate and me are basically working on the same things.
I would be more than happy to meet in an audio call. Our funded menschys project allowed me to work on fedigeo fulltime the past weeks. It might help anyone.
Also if we could establish a standard for federated geohash Collections which is our base for federated regions, geocoding and routing (federated routing uses openroute humanitarian/collaborative plan in the beginning). Would be happy to tell you more.

Carl FYI;
am also elected Policy Lead of Social CG, worked much towards consulting EU for DMA/DSA and co-org the official ActivityPub Conf https://conf.tube/c/apconf/_channel/videos

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

Hey @sl007@digitalcourage.social. Thanks for the message. I couldn't find any details about Menschys or Fedigeo, I'd love to know more about what you're doing. But just to clarify, I'm not planning to use ActivityPub in Habitat. I've realised recently that using the term "Fediverse" -- and perhaps posting to this Fediverse community has caused some confusion. Additionally, before I looked further into what ActivityPub was, I thought I was going to use it. I was under the impression that any decentralised system would count as "a part the fediverse". Habitat will certainly be federated, but it's possible that it will only be a Fediverse platform as much as email (for example) is a Fediverse platform. I don't plan to write any functionality that will implicitly allow non-Habitat applications communicate with it. I hope that clears things up. My apologies for the confusion, it seems I've confused a lot of people over this and it wasn't my intention.