Hi Aussie.zone.

I just want to put this project called Habitat by Carl Newton, spoken about in this feddit.uk Lemmy Post, on people here's radar as a possibly complementary web based social media project that could be run for communities in Australia. As one of the more experimental segments of social online activity in this country, it makes sense that AZ people may have more than an average interest.

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. - Carl Newton

Its been compared to nextdoor, I could see it used as a bit of an open access rss newsfeed, but there is a most clear tie in as an information source working and integrating with developing open source street maps like Open Street Map. As can be seen in the browsing london video on Newton's blog

Here is an existing/test instance https://www.irthlingborough.net/

Would be keen to join. But I'm not currently up to hosting, and the chances of my town setting up anywhere besides Facebook in the foreseeable future are slim to none. Sadface.

Yeah, i think thats fair. I can't see enough people outside of the facebook ecosystem discovering this at the moment, to make it naturally grow. But at the same time there is a kind of 'build it and they will come' philosophy that could apply with these things.

I suppose this post is part of me slowly trying to figure out how a networked set of online options could be built out for Australians in particular, and thats less reliant on other countries, especially US, Russia or China, et al.