Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160218

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160073

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.

[bigfish@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Nice! An actual replacement to Nextdoor.

[sbv@sh.itjust.works]

Is there a sample instance so we can see it in action?

[libertylizard@slrpnk.net]

Oh wow this would be huge. The local sub is the main thing that keeps me coming back to Reddit.

However, it probably will take some local organizing to get it to fire in each area. Getting a critical mass for these is tough by just having randomly distributed global internet users join. Even with thousands of users, the California community on Lemmy is way less active than the sub for my city on Reddit.

[Guest]

Where can I get more info on this, like how to join?

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

This is my local instance: https://www.irthlingborough.net/

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

It’s distributed – you’ll need to create an instance for your own area. To do so, take a look at the getting started section: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started

More information of what it is and how it’s planned to be in the future is in my previous blog posts:

• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/
• https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

[davidgro@lemmy.world]

So I notice one bit of missing information: where is that place?

Besides curiosity, there’s also the practical question of whether it’s the right one to sign up for:
Say I encounter one named “Springfield” - how would I know which of the 93 (in the US alone) it is?

I propose having a map on the About page showing the area covered, with the ability to zoom out and see which state/province/etc, which country, and which continent.

[thisone@lemmy.world]

This is very cool. But I’m thumb fingered idiot.

How can I check and see if anyone in my area had started an instance I can join?

[Guest]

Thanks mate. I’ll look at that tomorrow.

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

Thanks for this. I hadn’t considered it but it seems like a really obvious thing now you’ve said it … testament to a good idea I think! I’ll add it.

[carlnewton@feddit.uk]

Unless you live in my home town, it’s highly unlikely that there are any other instances yet. From a practical point of view, until I build in federation, it’s a matter of literal word of mouth between people of a community. Once it’s federated, the nearby tab will show you your closest instance.

[mxremy@piefed.social]

I remember that post!! Really cool to see that you ran with it, I’d love for this to catch on

[ageedizzle@piefed.ca]

However, it probably will take some local organizing to get it to fire in each area. Getting a critical mass for these is tough by just having randomly distributed global internet users join.

Maybe one strategy here is to promote it at universities? That’s how Facebook got a critical mass before opening it up to the general public. People would join if other people from their school are on it, and its much easier to achieve critical mass at a university than a city at large.

You could start with the compsci students, who might appreciate it for the merits of the ActivityPub protocol. From there, you could branch out to other departments. Hopefully this will create enough activity to make it an attractive place to join for the city at large.

Once you get enough people on there, you could reach out to local politicians (eg city councillors) and ask them to join. If they join then hopefully they promote their account at least once on their mainstream normie social media like X, which will hopefully attract a few users from there.

Hanging flyers around the city with a QR code is another option. I know in my city people do that to promote a local Discord for cyclists. That Discord is very active.

Asking for a call out on local email newsletters is also a helpful possibility. I know a separate urbanists Discord group in my city that has got a fair amount of users from their email mailing list, which they’ve picked up just from a signup form on their local website as far as I’m aware.

Promotion on your local FB group or subreddit is also a very viable option.

If you live in a small community, then you can’t beat word of mouth.

Anyway, there are strategies! I have hope. Let’s make this a thing.

[libertylizard@slrpnk.net]

Wow great comment. But I’d have to figure out who is going to host a local server first. I’m not super tech savvy personally, especially compared to Lemmings.

[surewhynotlem@lemmy.world]

Is it really a replacement if there aren’t crazy people ranting about their neighbors while drunk?

[ageedizzle@piefed.ca]

You should give it a shot and ask OP if you have any questions. If you were to set it up, you’d be one of the first, and I’m sure OP would be happy to help you get his/her brain child up and running.

[libertylizard@slrpnk.net]

Yeah I think it’s way beyond what I would know how to do… I’ve also got some pretty crazy things happening in my life right now so I’m not looking to take on any big projects at this time. Maybe when things are back to normal.

Or I’ll ask around and see if anyone else is interested in doing it.

[ageedizzle@piefed.ca]

Well Godspeed to you. Whatever you end up doing I wish your local virtual community the best, be it on Reddit or the fediverse or wherever

[ageedizzle@piefed.ca]

I’m kind of a noob here, so forgive me if this is a silly question, but: what kind of hardware would I need to self-host a server? I’m guessing a raspberry-pi wouldn’t cut it. So would I need to rent server space?