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Comment by carlnewton | Hacker News Reader

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a self-hosted social platform for local communities. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I want it to be easily installable for those who want to host using docker, and for those who want to host on an EC2 instance or something, because online services for docker hosting are quite expensive, so I've been working recently on ansible setup, and it's proving quite difficult, so if anyone with the experience fancies helping out, I'd be more than happy to receive contributions.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2

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I have been thinking about a similar idea for a few months - a location-focussed social media. But my idea is more like Instagram with an extra location layer. You have a 'local' feed that shows public profiles of people in your area. You can then add those local people to some kind of 'friends' list - they can then see a more private profile, and you see their posts regardless of distance.

The key idea is that you can only add 'friends' if you've actually met them once in real life. So it wouldn't be overrun by celebrities and pseudo-social relationships, influencers, etc. I'm hoping it would foster more local connections - e.g. if someone often runs into a certain person at the same places and has similar interests, maybe they'll add each other as 'friends'.

Awesome! For me, the desire is very much about the place and not personalities or any kind of ego attached to their posts, so I've avoided any kind of functionality that will allow to follow a person, or see what else a particular person has posted, but we'll see how it evolves. If you have any programming experience, I do recommend just diving in rather than waiting for someone else to do it, as I have discovered that a lot of people seem to think that they share my vision but when it comes down to the details they have their own thing in mind. So if you want this Instagram with locations to exist, you might find that someone else's vision doesn't quite meet your desires for it.

I have had something similar in mind for a while, but nothing so fleshed out as you have here!

One question; how would you implement identity? I can imagine spam and unwanted content becoming a problem, so maybe a reputation system or network of trust mechanism would be needed?

Yeah this is something I've been thinking about recently, not so much in terms of the difficulty of managing spam on a per post basis, as I'm thinking that the instances will be very small and moderation on that front should be easy, so long as you can keep the problematic user from signing up in the first place. One thing I've been thinking is that perhaps there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle. It doesn't stop anyone else from using Google street view or something but it does make the bar the bit higher. I don't know how to deal with the obvious accessibility issue with this though so I'm going to keep it in mind until I get around to that sort of thing. Long term of course we're going to have the issue with federated spam also, so I don't want to implement a solution that will only be in my way in the long run.

> there could be a captcha-like solution that will benefit from the limited location. For instance: Select only images that are of this location. Local users will know, bots will struggle.

Hah, that is a fun idea! But it could be a challenge to implement, unless you have a trusted person in that location selecting an image or some other local funfact – and at that point you might as well implement a graph of trust, spreading out from the first user in that area. Kind of like an invite system, where everyone vouches for the next one they invite in.

Come to think of it, having a limiting factor that an invite system imposes, might make the whole concept more attractive and a bit mystical, as it takes some effort to access the network.

I can see a lot of challenges implementing this though, but it is fun to explore different new directions this could take!

Thanks, I'll give the trust system some thought. These are both systems that could be turned on or off per instance so I'm theory they could both exist. I was thinking that the instance administrator would have to be the one to prove the images for the captcha.

I like the idea and have been ruminating on something similar myself - starred!

Thanks so much! I work on it almost every weekend so hopefully you'll continue to see good progress.

This seems similar (or identical?) to Jodel (jodel.com).

Hey, sorry, I didn't initially see this comment. It looks like Jodel could be similar if you were to set up a Habitat instance that exclusively didn't allow for locations to be attached to any post, but that's not what I have in mind, and it's not how my instance will be set-up, because the location attached to the post is what I'm seeing as one of the main purposes of Habitat. In most cases, I envision a post representing an exact location. Perhaps a building, a country park, or a monument or something. Jodel looks like generic discussions that are filtered by proximity, which Habitat would have also by nature of federation, but the posts will be about places, and focused around a map-location of those places.

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