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.

Cool!

Nice! An actual replacement to Nextdoor.

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

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.

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

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

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:

• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/
• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

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.

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.

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?

Thanks mate. I’ll look at that tomorrow.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

pours drink Game on.

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.

1. has nothing to do with the fediverse, as it is a centralized, non-federated platform
2. 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.

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

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.

I'm running my instance from a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060. It's a very low power light weight computer. Maybe not as light-weight as a raspberry pi though, I'm not sure on that.

I was also running it on an aws ec2 t3.micro instance with no issue. I only switched to host it locally because I wanted to build for those who own home labs also, and I didn't want to pay the ~£20 a month for the micro instance.

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

Thank you!

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

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

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