this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities (feddit.uk)
submitted 6 months ago by carlnewton@feddit.uk to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What features are you thinking? To put a price on a post/mark as sold etc?

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I agree with the user above, over here facebook is so entrenched not just thanks to the location-based groups and tagging but through the marketplace too. People rely on it to sell their old stuff. Of course the main hurdle as usual is making people care enough to use a different thing, even though the current solution works well enough for their use case. I could see it happening if towns adopted it officially and there was a bit of communication about it. Does your program federate with other instances ? like, if I want to sell my old table, will people in nearby towns that are hosting their own instance see my post ?

In any case great initiative

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks for this. Regarding your point on on making people care, I've just written up a post that touches on this: https://feddit.uk/post/45292700

Federation is not yet built in, but I have a plan. There are some details here: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/#connecting-instances