Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities
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Is it really a replacement if there aren’t crazy people ranting about their neighbors while drunk?
pours drink Game on.
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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.
Could straight up petition the city to host the servers. It would have some interesting legal ramifications but it could help speed up adoption and also provide a full on town square thing, with actual city fundings.
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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.
- has nothing to do with the fediverse, as it is a centralized, non-federated platform
- services like that will never be successful, unfortunately. Social platforms only work if enough people you know use it. But you will never know it in the first place, as individual owners lack the proper marketing to spread around the word.
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I remember that post!! Really cool to see that you ran with it, I’d love for this to catch on
I’m still going! It’s been my weekend obsession for two years!
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- has nothing to do with the fediverse, as it is a centralized, non-federated platform
- services like that will never be successful, unfortunately. Social platforms only work if enough people you know use it. But you will never know it in the first place, as individual owners lack the proper marketing to spread around the word.
Federation has always been in the plan. Success for an individual instances is all the matters to any given owner, not success globally. The owner of an instance must have a vested interest in fostering their local community.
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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?
I’m running my instance from a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060. It’s a very low power light weight computer. Maybe not as light-weight as a raspberry pi though, I’m not sure on that.
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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?
I was also running it on an aws ec2 t3.micro instance with no issue. I only switched to host it locally because I wanted to build for those who own home labs also, and I didn’t want to pay the ~£20 a month for the micro instance.
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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.
Gotcha, well I’ll keep an eye out down the road. Good luck!
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Gotcha, well I’ll keep an eye out down the road. Good luck!
Thank you!
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Could straight up petition the city to host the servers. It would have some interesting legal ramifications but it could help speed up adoption and also provide a full on town square thing, with actual city fundings.
That’s an interesting idea. I think this would be most successful in a city that prides itself on being high-tech. Maybe somewhere in Japan or somewhere in Silicon Valley or something.
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