i see a lot of news about australian politics, news of seattle, darmstadt, brazil, ... all places where i don't live, where the posts aren't relevant to me. it would be cool to be able to tag posts/communities with a geographical location so i can easily filter which posts are / aren't probably relevant to me. in one setting in my profile, instead of having to block each community individually (there's hundreds of them at this point)

i propose that each post has a (one or many) geo_tag fields that just link to the canonical wikipedia page about the place, for example,

{
  "post_id": 1543535,
  "geo_tags": [
    "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne"
  ],
  ...
}

Another tag for lemmings to ignore besides the language tag.

I'm afraid if the idea is something like that, it won't allow users to search for content nearby. That'd require some coordinates to calculate distance. If it's just names, it's closer to the concept of hashtags. You could as well add #Melbourne in the text (on Mastodon for example). And people would then be able to click on #Melbourne or maybe subscribe to the hashtag once/if that feature is ready on Lemmy.

Wouldn't it make more sense to just have geo-based communities for that? Like 'australian-politics' or 'seattle-news'? The functionality is already there it just isn't being used.

Why invent new stuff for this? AS2 has the location property and Place object, which imo should be used for this. It's not like the request here requires functionality not enabled by those.

As far as Lemmy is concerned, I just joined an instance that's relevant to my location (feddit.uk). I suppose if it grew a great deal more popular than that, I could create a community there for my local county.

I should absolutely mention though that I'm still hard at work on Habitat, which is a platform for local communities, and each post has a lat/long location associated for a more hyperlocal type of interaction. It's not on the Fediverse though (though there are plans for non-Fediverse federation).

I doubt Lemmy will ever do this - e.g. moderator reports still don't federate to other instances until the release of v1.0, despite the Rexodus having been several years in the past now. Basically any solution would have to be on top of the software without needing any changes within it. Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.

Although predictably PieFed already has this functionality, for well over a year now. For one it has hashtags, plus user and post flairs, and for another it has categories of communities where someone can look at e.g. news across all regions, or pick let's say Europe and then choose from various sub-topics below that. Also, while these Topic areas are defined by the instance admins, the otherwise identical concept of topical Feeds are user-customizeable and even shareable, so someone has likely made what you are looking for already, but if not then you could make it and share with others to benefit from your efforts.

At worst even, say when interacting with existing communities that did not want to actively participate in the process of self-sorting their own content, users have keyword filters that can be used so that you as an end-user can do it entirely on your own. Such community discovery and management concerns are a solved problem on PieFed. I say this full well as someone who had the identical issue you described here when I was on Lemmy, and moving to PieFed solved it for me.

The developers are also extremely receptive to feedback, if you needed still more changes made to the code. I sincerely doubt that you will ever get a solution going using Lemmy - this identical (edit: general) concept has already been asked for many times over the years - but switching to PieFed should easily take care of it, offering multiple possibilities to make finding the content that you want easier.

oh thanks for making me aware of those :)

the point isn't to sub to communities that are physically close to me, but to not get recommendations about locations that are very clearly not relevant to me.

The "all" feed has a lot of those, so it's tedious to browse. But if i stick to subscribed communities, i never find new communities, which is also a problem.

yeah but hashtags don't tell you anything about what kind of thing it refers to. Is it a place? Is it a person? Is it an event? It does not provide that structured data that would be useful.

The thing is, a link to a Wikipedia article isn't structured data either. It could very well link to the article about The Little Mermaid. Or the List of fictional pirates. So in that regard, both approaches are about on the same level. The hashtag just cuts off the unnecessary "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..."

Lemmy puts up full-page advertisements for donations but a lot of that funding goes to running Lemmy.ml and seemingly only very little to actual code development.

Please stop spreading misinformation. The server for lemmy.ml only costs ~70€ per month which is only 2% of the total donation amount (3336€). With Lemmy we care a lot about writing high-quality and bug-free code as well as offering a good user experience. All of that takes time to do well.

Edit: For your information, only donations via Opencollective pay for lemmy.ml hosting. All other donation methods are exclusively paying for developer salaries.

yeah it's more about having a Place: ... property, not so much about the link itself.

ooh! would be cool if it was lemmy-compatible!

For your information, only donations via Opencollective pay for lemmy.ml hosting.

Perhaps that could be more clearly stated across the donation platforms?

Lemmy has great potential as a Reddit alternative, but its perceived association with lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad will inherently lead to some users not joining or donating. Emphasizing the distinction between funding for Lemmy and funding for Lemmy.ml would probably lead to an increased number of donations.

What about privacy tho? If I want people to know what continent I'm on I'll say so, amirite?

I'm sorry I just really like Seattle and telling people about how great Seattle is.

I wanted to build an entire social network that was based on that a decade ago.

the globe would be segmented into "tiles" and you could see activity in that tile. each user would have their own smaller tile that would be used to gather posts within their bounds, so in essence you could see a customized view if you were between 2-6 other tiles.

I wanted to go further and allow paid services to post information across multiple tiles. for example, if you had a product and wanted to target the whole world, you'd have to pay the fee for each tile in the entire world. of course you could still filter them out and such.

businesses could purchase their own tile where you could see things like how busy they are, menus, reviews, etc. this was particularly interesting for places like art museums where I wanted users to be able to see more information about displays and be able to have discussions about them within the community.

I had high hopes for it.

and then trump won his first term and I stopped working on it because I lost all motivation.

edit: tbh, lemmy and federation social networks in general have given me some small motivation but nothing more than thinking about how awesome it would have been. I would have been done with it by now if I had continued.

Where did you see these posts? On the ALL post feed?

i mean i guess it is but if it ends up being 5000 different communities for 5000 different places ... it accumulates and cloggs the feed.

i guess it would be a client-side setting or maybe a property of your account, only known to your server operator.

obligatory thank you to the devs! you did a great job so far.

there's still a lot of features that i'd like to see getting developed, like integration with other fediverse services (mastodon, pixelfed) and such, but i guess that it's just difficult and just takes a long time to be properly done

also i'm donating like $10/month

here's a link to the ActivityStream documentation about this: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#places

Understandable; over the many years, the community structure has gotten somewhat unkempt and rather unruly, I'll admit. I think the best solution I've seen is regional instances -- if you block seattle.pink and social.seattle.wa.us on mastodon, you can really clear up a lot of the Seattle chatter, but there isn't a regional instance for us to host our communities that you could block easily. Realistically, I'm not sure how much a field would help -- you'd still see away games for the Seattle sports teams even if you muted the Seattle geo-tag, for instance, since they would be posted with the geo-tag for the home team.

Also here's a link to the location property.

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-location

well, if they come here to play at my city, i'd like to watch them :3

Better integration with Mastodon or Pixelfed mainly needs to be done from their side, but it seems those projects are not interested. Are there any specific improvements you would like to see?

Thanks for donating!

moderator reports still don’t federate to other instances

you are mistaken. reports are federated from the reporter's instance to the community's instance, as well as to the instances of all moderators of the community, and to the instance of the user who posted the comment or post being reported.

Okay I'm adding that to the donation page on join-lemmy.org.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-translations/pull/50

A lot of your problems woild go away if you stopped browsing by all....

I always use it and I’m not the only one. But now that I think about at it at’s quite shitty to use in Thunder or I didn’t configure it well

Ever heard of wikidata?

The “all” feed has a lot of those

So you've just discovered why the "All" feed is called "All"... geez, people these days.

no, actually i haven't. what would it look like?

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3141

It’s linked on that Wikipedia article. It’s very useful to connect data independent of language. OSM can use it to connect places to more data. I think searxng uses it to generate infoboxes

It’s enough to automatically extract coordinates and compare tgat to your location. For an area comparation it is connected to the OSM relation https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4246124 among other things. Getting actual areas is pretty hard due to heterogene data

Q3141 is actually enough to know what it is

Each item is allocated a unique persistent identifier called its QID, a positive integer prefixed with the upper-case letter "Q"

oh, that is really useful! thank you

xD it even has its lemmy community linked

which seems super useful actually, if you just enter your location.