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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.