Show HN: Geofenced chat communities anyone can create

I was interested in trying this, but the UI is like pulling teeth. I couldn't accept the ToS because the checkbox was under the terms box, and had to tap very carefully.

Then I tried to create a Hub, but couldn't figure out how to get it to accept my drawing (there's no "done" button, only "cancel", even though the polygon I want is right there). After a few frustrating tries, I went back and noticed that I need to click the first point again, which is very unintuitive.

After that, it kept complaining that my area is too big, and there was no way to live-adjust the area while seeing how big it is. I had to cancel out of the whole thing, go out to the hub screen, then click "start drawing" again for another try. I didn't make it past that.

Thanks for the feedback! I increased the max size from 125 hectares to 5000 hectares. I had some debate about what would be a good max size, not so large that it takes up a whole city, but also not so small that few people can join it. For some reason which I can no longer remember I landed on 125 hectares.

It is probably too small, but for now I just want to make it easy to use. At the default zoom level 125 hectares is tiny and I am not surprised it was hard to make something small enough. I just got so used to the way it worked when I was testing I would immediately zoom in without noticing.

It will not save your hub unless you're logged in. The logic was that since someone needed to be an admin, they needed to be logged in. I should probably find a work around for that for now while I am just trying to get people to test it out. No one wants to give their email to some random site.

I am going to work on making the hub drawing more intuitive. It should really have a done button.

Thanks for giving it a try.

Yep, these decisions are perfectly understandable, it's just that I need to know what's happening and why I can't do certain things. Drawing blindly only to be told that your area is 126 hectares, for example, is frustrating.

It's good that you increased the area for now, because there's no way that I find anyone on there in what's basically the size of a neighbourhood. Maybe you could reduce it if it gets more popular?

I've been looking for something like this for a while![1]

How do you deal with spam?

For example, Telegram has a "people near me" option which is full of drugs and sex-workers. Great if you like that sort of thing, but not exactly welcoming if you just want to chat to other people in the park / conference / stadium etc.

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/why-is-it-so-hard-to-chat-t...

For anyone else trying to find the Telegram feature:

> Telegram Announces Removal of "People Nearby" Feature

Back in the day when Direct Connect[1] was a thing, and we all had insane speeds in the metropolitan area (but not so great outside of that), I used to run a DC hub. Which due to said speeds had mostly people that were close by, geographically speaking, and the interactions felt so much more relevant, probably because of the "third thing" you mention, the common interest/background.

So I've also been thinking for a while now: how can that style of community be recreated? There's of course the chicken-and-egg problem until you have traction, but also things like: how big should the community be, geographically? The same size in the US vs EU likely encompasses quite different amounts of people. Should it be anonymous or real identities? Should history be viewable by new members or should it be ephemeral? And so on.

Anyway, interesting prototype, I hope you get some traction!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

This was the model YikYak used and it was so much fun. They very much promoted it for use at colleges for students, but ended up geofence blocking it around high schools/middle schools because of cyberbulling concerns.

But, if enough people used it around certain areas, it could be a lot of fun & very helpful just to chit chat & talk about the weather & etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak

EDIT I can't accept the terms on my Samsung phone, as the text is over top of the buttons and I can't do anything but scroll the terms. Not sure if this is a browser (Brave) problem or a font size or what.

https://imgur.com/a/LjFFLn5

This happened to me too - the solution is to temporarily set the page view as desktop view through the browser settings.

The concept reminds me of YikYak which amassed a large user base and was successful. But you should also take a look at why YikYak failed in the end.

The solution here is human moderation and accepting that it's not going to turn into a unicorn, but a sustainable medium-sized business is incredibly possible. There are existing examples of this.

Which examples? I can’t think of any profitable companies with a profile like that. Free social media sites basically require scale.

Human moderation is going to be a huge hurdle for this. Connecting Internet users by location seems like a massive safety liability.

Making sure users are human and not just gathering locations of uses at an individual non-aggregated level also seems like a horrendous bad time.

On top of that, anonymous mode is going to be removed in the future, so you literally just have to tell other users your seemingly somewhat precise location, tied to your real persona.

Who wants this?

It’s also crazy that this site asks for location before even telling us what it is. On mobile it’s especially bad because the site isn’t even loaded or visible before the OS prompt covers basically the whole screen.

The service does need your location on the marketing page, collect that when users actually start using it.

[1]: Been around for 25 years, apparently employees 20 people and is still popular to this day. Donation-based.

[2] Seven paid staff members, $5 for an account, been around at least 22 years.

And there are bound to be a dozen outside the US that I don't know of. I've heard of this [3] being a Dutch one that had a good run for decades with multiple full-time employees, but can't confirm as I don't speak Dutch. Supposedly ad and donation sustained (?). Again, has outlived most social networks. Maybe a Dutch HNer who reads this can tell us more.

You can mean a thousand things by "profitable" but both achieve what I posited and what most commonly underlies "profitable": sustainable. And they are. They're easily in the top 1% of social networks by longevity. That the former is non-profit doesn't make a material difference, these are effectively medium-sized businesses as I posited.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_Porch_Forum

[2] https://www.metafilter.com

[3] https://www.fok.nl

Not AI moderation? I'd assume the more scalable option is having an LLM parse messages when reported.

What techniques do you use to prevent users from using GPS spoofing to join distant chats?

This is really great, the only problem for me is that there is nobody around me! I can see it working way better for stuff like universities though.

I wonder if there could be a variant for Drop which is world wide - imagine being able to join a chat in a foreign country (hopefully you speak the language!) and chat with the locals. I imagine moderation would be a big pain but I could see it being fun and sort of in the spirit of the old web.

Right, there's an onboarding/bootstrapping problem where the first users in an area have nobody to talk to. The default radius should scale by user density, perhaps.

I've noticed so many bot accounts are angry at any website whose purpose is to quarantine Indian spammers, but if a single one of them had actually tried the website they would have commented "Hey you have the baseUrl wrong, the ToS "Accept" button makes a request to http://localhost:3008/signup and http://localhost:3008/api/auth/anonymous"

I "hacked" my way in but seem to be the only drop/hub in the entire server. My feedback:

- The error message that anon users can't create hubs should happen when they click "Create", not after they go through the creation process

- 125 hectares is ridiculously small. Even in densely-populated areas, it takes 2500 hectares encompasses a neighborhood

- The chat window doesn't maximize, it's just a sidebar, and there's no emojis or GIFs or image embeds or links or markdown/richtext support or ability to edit/delete messages

- It would be cool if there was a bottom bar with a "global chat" / event log where you see people creating new hubs/drops

You should be able to accept the TOS on mobile now - although if your screen is really small it may be hard to actually read it, still working on that. Honestly I'm pretty embarrassed that I missed that. The TOS was the last thing I added late last night before making the post and I didn't check how it worked on mobile.

Thanks for all the feedback so far! It has been very helpful.

Well, now I'm even more embarrassed. I left some local variables in when I pushed the fix this morning and the site was blocked CORS for about an hour. This is why you don't push to prod when you're in a rush and half asleep. Thanks for letting me know.

After failing to create a hub (too large in my cade) the state of hub selection isn't reset (you need to cancel manually before retrying)

This is super cool, and exactly what I’d want! Although I just tried creating a Drop (twice) and it didn’t seem to work.

Great idea!

I have been thinking about similar systems: https://web.archive.org/web/20061014073443/http://zby.aster....

I can't accept the ToS on mobile

Same here on desktop

I could on Firefox mobile

Same here (MacBook Air). I assume the developer uses a large screen.

On chrome iOS I’m physically unable to press the three checkboxes on the terms which means I can’t try your app. They appear to be overlapped by the terms themselves and thus never received click events.

iOS safari same issue. can’t get passed the terms

Yeah, this only appears to work on desktops with a res of 4K or greater, which is… not ideal for a social network?

If I may... focus on improving the UI, this is the exact same "template" we are seeing across thousand of SaaS and it lowers credibility instantly.

"Failed to fetch" error, when trying to sign up.

Hi! I wanted to try this and had a hard time accepting the checkboxes in the terms popup on safari. It works in Chrome but safari I cannot.

I am not expert, but we should definitely have a SSH based chat experience in 2025. Everything is moving to terminal, this should too!

Cool! On Chrome Desktop, I'm unable to sign up due to not being able to click the top T&C checkbox (overlapping content).

The terms of service modal is broken on iOS Firefox. The checkbox is not clickable. I was not able to try it out as a result.

I created an app using a similar concept as a hackathon project, in meteorJS. It was fun! We won 2nd place.

I can’t accept the ts and cs. They’re just greyed out.

The whole thing is a bad idea.

You’re looking to replicate a college campus experience but for the general public. That’s your first yellow flag so to speak.

The problem is that adults don’t live on college campuses and don’t really have the same socialization patterns. They’re not in a “safe” bubble where everyone they encounter has the commonality of attending the same admission-required school, where they have a baseline level of trust for random people like a college student has for the other people in their bubble. College students can get physically kicked off of campus for doing things against school policy that aren’t even at the level of being illegal. In real life I can be living next to a convicted sex offender and there’s nothing I can do about it besides move.

Your competitor is Facebook Groups, which is an absolute elephant in the space.

Your implementation so far feels creepy. You’re asking for location immediately on the marketing page (why?).

The marketing page seems to indicate that users are just going to disclose their exact current location and not be anonymous after the beta. The screenshots look like I’m going to reveal my location to strangers as a dot on a map. I don’t know if you’re really disclosing your users’ exact locations to each other or if they’re made more generalized but that seems like an immediate no thanks for just about anyone with any reasonable sense of threat evaluation.

I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, but your founder profile seems to be “two nerdy male college students.”

Can I ask you: do you think women would want to disclose their semi-precise location to strangers on the Internet? What’s the male to female ratio on this campus discord server you’re looking to capture the vibe from?

You also say this experience is trying to replicate the close community you have on discord. Why am I not just using discord? Spoiler alert: I’m already using discord with local people in my area.

Amazing portfolio project, I’m just not vibing with it as a business idea.

Please repost when you fix the accept TOS step

The legal terms seem pretty evil for what this is. I'll allow that evil may not be the intent. Perhaps you just asked a lawyer for the most bulletproof terms possible, but what you've end up with is a very one sided set of terms. Honestly the more I read, the weirder they get. If I tell a lie to another user, them I'm liable to be banned? I see what you are going for in that section, but as written, any normal, day to day, social lubricant style lie/falsehood could get you banned? On a social network?

Edit: reading further, I suspect these were just taken from somewhere unless in 2025 they've got some Flash code to protect:

>Copy or adapt the Services' software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.

It is evil to not allow lies?

That does not seem to be so evil .. but I did not found the legal terms on a first glance, so maybe there is more?

I think it's evil - by a small stretch of the word - to think that it's appropriate to forbid lying in general on a social chat platform, particularly as a bannable offence. It's also foolish to think that such terms could be reasonably enforced.

"It's also foolish to think that such terms could be reasonably enforced."

It would be a good legal base though, to be able to enforce it if needed.

What is your credit card info? Don't lie.

I don't want to tell you

is a truth and a perfectly safe answer

That doesn't answer my question though :D You can either lie outwardly or by omission. xD

It did answer your question. One can also refuse a answer - that is not lying, neither by omission or anything else.

Ok so it was tongue-in-cheek if not obvious but thanks whoever for the downvote. Then a bit more serious... There might be even better examples but let's consider that someone is part of a community that can use what is considered a slur, depending on context, or a term of endearment, depending on context and who uses it etc... If someone else uses it but fails to disclose their appartenance to said group. When asked, they can refuse to disclose it.

Is it fair to get them banned from the community? Can we consider that they might be lying by omission? After all they didn't answer and they might pass themselves as part of a community.

There are also colloquial considerations in online interactions that might be taken into account.

This is not really what I was veering toward initially but simply as a way to bring some more nuance since humor doesn't work here apparently.

This is the sort of things we see on twitter/X etc. You can't force people to speak differently, you can't force people to disclose information they would not want to disclose, but you may want to have some sort of policy to rule these kind of issues.

"When asked, they can refuse to disclose it."

Yes and that is still not a lie. Your comment above seems to imply otherwise and it was not humor to me, but arguing in bad faith.

"Is it fair to get them banned from the community?"

If the rules say no lying, then yes.

"You can't force people to speak differently"

Of course you can. Why do you think I am around here and not on reddit or alike? There are clear rules around discourse and they are enforced.

It is a lie if they use it as if they were a full-fledged member of a community while not actually being a true member of said community.

If I disguise myself as a man, that does not mean that I can go the male restrooms. If I am asked for proof that I am actually female for some reason, can I decline showing such proof?

And regarding arguing in bad faith, I was not arguing. Maybe you are not aware of the expression 'lying by omission'? But the smileys I used were supposed to make obvious that it was a joke/tongue-in-cheek. Even the initial question was tongue-in-cheek. Do you sincerely believe that I expect to receive some credit card info?!!!

Ack that this example might not be best since the lie in the first place is the disguise. But, not everything is ruled by law, especially online. Which is also the point of the question.

"It is a lie if they use it as if they were a full-fledged member of a community while not actually being a true member of said community."

That would be a lie, yes. (I found your example above not clearly written and still am not quite sure what you meant exactly)

"And regarding arguing in bad faith, I was not arguing. Maybe you are not aware of the expression 'lying by omission'? But the smileys I used were supposed to make obvious that it was a joke/tongue-in-cheek. Even the initial question was tongue-in-cheek. Do you sincerely believe that I expect to receive some credit card info?!!!"

Asking for information and someone declining that information has nothing to do with lying by ommision. That you try to make a connection here is what makes me believe you are not debating (or talking about or whatever) in good faith.

"But, not everything is ruled by law, especially online. Which is also the point of the question."

But this is about a concrete community, where my point is, they can very much rule certain things by their law.

And to me by default, lying is evil. And not banning those who lie (which was the starting point here).

So on an online forum, do you really think that you can force people to choose a profile picture that represents them accurately? Or is it a lie and it is a bannable offense? How do you enforce the truth?

> Asking for information and someone declining that information has nothing to do with lying by omission.

You may want to look up the definition of 'lying by omission'. Within the context of asking for profile information, it might well be. My point is that you need to be more measured. Even lying can be for protection at times. Sometimes it is not. It is not as straightforward as you make it seem.

An interesting thesis if you have time: https://theses.hal.science/tel-02170022/file/Icard-2019-Thes...

"Even lying can be for protection at times."

Oh for sure. But the idea (to me) is, if you have am honest online community with lots of trust build up, you don't need to.

"do you really think that you can force people to choose a profile picture that represents them accurately"

Of course you can. But that does not mean it is a must. That depends on the specific rules.

"You may want to look up the definition of 'lying by omission'. Within the context of asking for profile information, it might well be"

But not with the examples you gave.

I will check out the paper later, but I doubt I will learn much new. It is not a new topic to me.

One of these statements is a lie:

I live in America

I have red hair

I like bluebirds

Do you think it is good and just and fair to ban someone for one of these falsehoods?

Depends what your intentions are. If I want a authentic community, I would not want people to participate who lie where they live.

Otherwise there is the concept of making a prank which is fine by me.

But intentionally spreading lies for political propaganda or scam is very much a reason to ban someone like this for me.

So you agree with me then? I'm confused.

You edited your post, so not sure what your point is.

Either way, I would not agree that banning liers is evil.

How did you even find a TOS? The link to both that and the privacy policy on the Sign Up modal don't work.

Yeah, that is a good point. I might need to tone it down a bit. Not trying to be evil, the intent was to protect myself and the users. I worried about what could go wrong like chatrooms turning into toxic places or the service being used for nefarious purposes. I wanted set some rules. I am a student though and I don't have money for lawyers so I just copied a boilerplate legal contract from a service and didn't change much.

I'm trying to keep in mind this isn't something you approached as a product to release or anything, and you're a student. I feel like I'm coming off pretty harshly here, but... you should be more worried about the "nefarious purposes" part than anything else, right now. I feel like offering this sort of service publicly - particularly in 2025 - requires some legal counsel.

One other concern about the implementation: it sounds like Hub administrators - who is just the first person to create a Hub in a particular area - are given a lot of power. No more Hubs are able to be created in an area? So if a Hub admin abuses their power that area is screwed, unless of course you (or whoever would be handling such cases, if indeed that would happen) agreed that they've overstepped, which may or may not be the case, particularly with a vague TOS

Anyway I think the idea is intriguing, and like new ways of exploring social media/communities.