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Comment by dhritzkiv | Hacker News Reader

Something like https://www.mapbox.com may help

Sure, I didn't know about that until someone else pointed it out to me just now. I agree it's a beautiful rendering. It's paid though. That point aside, Sneak said what I meant to. If the goal is to have 7 billion people using OSM, this needs to be out of the box / default. Usability can't be an afterthought or something that's left up to the developer (if the goal is that sort of penetration)

You still don't seem to understand. There's nothing that comes "out of the box". The OSM project provides the data, that's it. Use the map provider that you like best to visualize that data.

Thanks for this piece of insight. Nobody in OSM's community of many thousands had ever brought it up before.

The reality is that if OSM is to scale to 7 billion users it itself can _not_ be the provider of all the tiles. The amount of infrastructure that this would require would be prohibitive for a nonprofit. Rendering & serving map tiles isn't like serving wikipedia pages.

n people using OSM the dataset, _not_ n people using osm.org.

use != going to the website

Yes it's paid, because it's storing and rendering images that are updated by the minute in a very fast time. That sort of compution, and calculation isn't cheap. As you can see the compressed file format is about 25GB.

you can use TileMill to render the tiles and then host them yourself. its the hosting and the render farm that you can pay MapBox for, but there are ways around it if you are small and prepared to do work.

I agree the default OSM map is a bit ... pink. and yellow. and then blue. but at least it isn't Simpsons Yellow like default google. but see the link I posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7174856 for more free examples

this interface lets you switch between many free tile providers: http://leaflet-extras.github.io/leaflet-providers/preview/

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