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.
A local bulletin born basically would be nice if thats what this is, not using facebook
It could certainly be used like that. For me personally, I like the idea of discussing local areas of beauty, monuments, history of the area etc
Any relation to Lucasfilm/Fujitsu Habitat/Habitat II? https://renoproject.org/
It was an early virtual world, running originally on Commodore 64s, later on PCs and (in Japan) Sega Saturn, with a look and style heavily inspired by SCUMM games.
Forgive me if any of these questions have obvious answers:
Would Habitat be suitable for hosting community events, or communities in general?
if you ran a hobby group, would your local Habitat be the place to share things? How much control is in the hands of the users vs the administrator?
Could you help me understand what you mean by “hosting community events”? Your users can create posts about events, but it has no tools for video calls or anything like that. Users can create posts in the categories created by the administrator. They can leave comments on those posts. There are a bunch of moderation tools and ability for the administrator to have settings for posts based on the category they’re in.
Is this NextDoor but for communists?
People keep making the comparison. I don’t know, I’m not sure what features next door has, but I know it isn’t self hosted.
Hopefully not just communists
Does it support Activity Pub?
Not activity pub specifically, but federation has always been in the plan.
sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet
Is there a way community members can vote on things?
Hi @carlnewton@feddit.uk , I really love this idea and really appreciate you taking on this big task.
I can see it replacing the stand-alone web site I run now for a local group, but I have a couple of questions before I go install the app and try it out.
- Do you have a list of existing instances somewhere? I looked around in your github and blog site, and could not find that.
- How do you keep the content that gets posted to stick to the local topic? I.e., if I set up a site for my small city, what’s to stop someone from spamming posts about the big city nearby? Or a big city plumber from advertising their services?
- How do admins deal with spam / negative content getting posted? Once a site takes off, this is a real problem, I hope you’re thinking about how to solve.
Again, thanks.
Hello!
- Existing instances: www.irthlingborough.net - despite the fact that I’ve been working on this for two years, you are amongst the first people to ever see a proper release. Before now, it would’ve been a challenging task for anyone else to install an instance. So I believe the only instance is that of my home town.
- Users can only post locations within the proximity of their own habitat. The marker can only be placed inside of a circle determined by the admin. Additionally, you can create a registration challenge that relies on local knowledge for someone to sign up.
- I’ve built in moderation tools to make banning, freezing accounts, promoting moderators, blocking email addresses etc. The idea is that communities will be small and manageable by small teams as a result.
Even in my relatively liberal U.S. city, Next Door is overrun by Magats who are cheered on and protected by right-wing Magat moderators. It needs to die and this looks like a great replacement.
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!
…you want us to get together and moan with each other? Buddy! I didn’t know this was that kind of app!
It’s a similar story for the multiple Facebook communities for where I live. They handed a lot of bans during covid era while pushing anti-vax rhetoric.
Agreed. Tried NextDoor years ago and found it was primarily a venue for busybodies, nosy neighbors and HOAs to complain and nag people about nonsense. I love the idea of an app like this, but hate the people who use it the most.
It goes deeper with Nextdoor. During Covid someone living next to a local evangelical church posted pictures of a packed event where no one was wearing a mask. Some of those pictures included the backs of a few kid’s heads.
The “good Christian” church members complained that he was a pedophile and Nextdoor deleted his account! This could not be done by moderators and required Nextdoor executive approval.
Nextdoor is a Maggot haven from top to bottom.
Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots. I’m in the same boat, I try to just ignore them. Next-door is nice for getting rid of stuff you don’t need, otherwise I would uninstall it.
Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots.
Could be, but those bots must be programmed to simulate actual Maggots. They don’t know how to spell, capitalize or use punctuation, much less write more than a single barely comprehensible sentence.
Out in my neck of the woods, NextDoor wouldn’t be effective. Lots of acreage between people. We don’t take kindly to snoopers and busybodies. We keep an eye on each other, but not in a nosy neighbor kind of way. Now, where my lady friend lives, it’s eat up with NextDoor. She showed me her feed once, I was like ‘You know, I strongly believe America could solve about 50% of their problems with this one simple trick: Mind Your Own Business!’.
I found it useful for some things. We have a pack of coyotes in town that preys on dogs and occasionally is spotted in the neighborhood. It was also useful for business & contractor recommendations, but have to otherwise agree with you.
coyotes in town
That’s understandable. However ‘I see Mr Jones left his garbage cans at the road for a third day’ would get a response like ‘Mr Jones here, I just ramset the cans to the sidewalk. Suck it!’.
This seems like something that would really benefit from better language support. I saw the translations folder in the repo, but you should probably get it linked up to a Weblate instance or similar and have people start contribute different languages asap.
I’m glad you found the translations folder. Support for different languages was always in the plan, I just wanted to see if anyone actually plans on installing and using it before I keep going with that. You’ll see it’s in progress on the GitHub project board.
Next Lemmy update is going to have an option to block image posts (to remove low quality meme threads). People should stop turning text posts into image posts to avoid being blocked. I also find these hybrid posts quite annoying. You’re making your post look like something it’s not.
A post introducing a graphical web-based system would be remiss if an image of that graphical system was missing.
Of course you can block those posts (if that function is.enabled) , but you’d be missing out on many discussions.
This wasn’t my intention. What does it make my post look like?
Preach!
I lack the use case for this service but, it looks good on paper. Nice!
If I understand the project right, this would be a great opening for non-profit communities to make a page for the town and add the services, instead of the typical static pages
I love the sound of this. Kind of a decentralized Next door but better? I’ve been really wanting a place for some local communities to organize that isn’t Facebook. Perhaps I’ll spin up an instance and see if I can get some interest.
Awesome! Let me know how you get on!
Looks cool! I’d love to see local buynothing groups have a Fediverse alternative.
Out of curiosity, is there any standard or common format around location data for Fediverse platforms?
I absolutely love this idea. Does it support ActivityPub? And I would love to see users can set labels on themselves like what expertise they can offer etc.
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!
It seems to me that activity pub could still be useful for a couple of reasons. If you live in the suburbs of a city, then bring able to also access an instance for your suburb and your city might be useful.
And if you live in multiple locales, or if want to stay connected to your old home town etc
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!
That was my bad. I was espousing federation, not AP specifically, and I see that federation is built in to the idea
I like the idea. I don’t want to use facebook or similar, but that’s where stuff like “BuyNothing” is most active.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about self hosting (beyond what I’ve picked up working in software development) so I don’t see myself running one of these myself. I’d probably use it if it came to my neck of the woods (NYC)
