carlnewton

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Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Please do have a read of this: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/#connecting-instances

I feel quite confident that a gossip protocol approach is the right way to go, but seamless connectivity to other instances is absolutely planned!

Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 17 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I've built in the ability to hide categories for this kind of reason. I was thinking, for instance, that people who enjoy a good moan can join the "Moaners Club" category, and the rest of us can hide that category from our feeds to get on with the categories we enjoy. Regarding problematic moderators, I have built a moderation log to keep them accountable, and of course, if they don't show themselves to have good intentions, those with good intentions could create their own instance -- I don't know why I'm going into this kind of detail -- you're on Lemmy after all, you know the score!

Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 4 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Now that's an interesting idea!

This release is step one in the plan. Federation is step two! More information on this here: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

I love what activitypub has done for the internet, but I don't think it will be right for this project, but yes to federation -- if there are instances to federate with of course!

Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 3 points 2 hours ago

Awesome! Let me know how you get on!

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Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities (feddit.uk)
 

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.