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.
Ah! Oh cool, but this would take geolocation. I predict that being a hard sell for lemmings.
But as I type that i realise/remember your post here is primarily an introduction for potential instance operators, not so much a user base. So the geolocation as an 'issue' is likely far less important (not forgetting a user can just turn it off anyway).
Eh, if it's an open-source application where you can review the code to confirm that the software isn't tracking you, then it's not an issue. Especially if you're running Graphene OS, Rethink DNS, or Exodus to either sandbox or monitor your traffic
you can't review what's running on the actual server, what did your local admin add to it.
ostensibly, there is no need to send your location anywhere, as everything could be set up to be done client-side where you get a registry of published instance locations and sort them by distance to your current location.
One could simply infer the location history from the logs though.
only if the data gets sent. it's doesn't have to be.
You could level that accusation at any software running on a remote server, including the Fediverse
most fediverse software does not collect precise geolocation though, which is why this point was brought up