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.

  • perishthethought@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    7 hours ago

    Hi @carlnewton@feddit.uk , I really love this idea and really appreciate you taking on this big task.

    I can see it replacing the stand-alone web site I run now for a local group, but I have a couple of questions before I go install the app and try it out.

    1. Do you have a list of existing instances somewhere? I looked around in your github and blog site, and could not find that.
    2. How do you keep the content that gets posted to stick to the local topic? I.e., if I set up a site for my small city, what’s to stop someone from spamming posts about the big city nearby? Or a big city plumber from advertising their services?
    3. How do admins deal with spam / negative content getting posted? Once a site takes off, this is a real problem, I hope you’re thinking about how to solve.

    Again, thanks.

    • Carl Newton@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      2·
      2 hours ago

      Hello!

      1. Existing instances: www.irthlingborough.net - despite the fact that I’ve been working on this for two years, you are amongst the first people to ever see a proper release. Before now, it would’ve been a challenging task for anyone else to install an instance. So I believe the only instance is that of my home town.
      2. Users can only post locations within the proximity of their own habitat. The marker can only be placed inside of a circle determined by the admin. Additionally, you can create a registration challenge that relies on local knowledge for someone to sign up.
      3. I’ve built in moderation tools to make banning, freezing accounts, promoting moderators, blocking email addresses etc. The idea is that communities will be small and manageable by small teams as a result.