Hey, I gave this a watch but their use of the word ‘local’ doesn’t match mine in this case. When I use the word local, I’m referring to a geographic area, or at least a server that represents a geographic area. It looks like when local-first talk about local, they’re referring to interaction on a device. It would be nice to be able to have habitat not require an internet connection to queue a post, this is a great idea and I’ll look into that, but their point on “it should still work on device if the remote server is down (or even disappears forever)” I don’t believe is possible when we’re building a community platform. Or, at least, if such a thing is possible, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I appreciate the heads-up though, I love that such a group exists.

I haven’t, but I will absolutely look at this on the weekend! Thanks so much

Thanks for this! 😃 I have been going back and forth on the idea of providing the end user with the ability to create their own categories. I was wondering whether it would be better to have an Other type category which the admin can react to and create categories as needed, but your post has pushed me back to the idea of allowing category creation. I think if I do implement that, I’ll have a switch for it, so that the instance admin can choose.

Thanks! Worst case scenario is that I’ll learn a lot and have fun doing so.

😀 that’s great to hear! Thanks

Hey, you asked to be kept updated, so I thought I’d let you know that I have been working on Habitat: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

Thanks for this. I really appreciate (and enjoyed!) the use cases. What I have in mind is mostly the information sharing use case. I think there’s been a lot of focus on such a platform “catching on” and what it means on the global scale, and I did get caught up in that for a brief moment, but I’ve realised that my interest on the global scale is misplaced. I want something that primarily works for a local community, and I want it to be decentralised in a fashion so that if instances decide to acknowledge each-other’s existence, they’ll provide the ability to look for physically close posts by pointing to each other when relevant. This might not be how the rest of the Fediverse works, or want’s to work, but it seems better and actually simpler in design to me. I think I’m going to go off and try building my own thing. If nothing else, it’ll be a learning experience.

The Hometown functionality isn’t what I’m describing. I want something in which the experience is about physical proximity to the subject. I may be bad at explaining this. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Yes, it looks like this is a better comparison than Nextdoor in terms of features.

Hey, you’re the second person to suggest that it could be achieved with Mastodon. I’ll look into it, and if it can be achieved with Mastodon in the way that I’m picturing, I won’t be reinventing the wheel, thanks.

I’ll look into that, thanks. If someone has already done the work that’d be amazing!

Thanks Rimu! Steal away! I just watched a video of you demonstrating PieFed. It’s good to get some positive feedback from a developer with experience in building a decentralised platform, because as of yet, I don’t have that.

I’ll almost certainly be using ActivityPub if and when, and I’ll keep in mind this address amendment :D

Hey! Thanks for the feedback! :D Regarding your point on whether or not it could ever take off, I’ve given this some thought over the last 24 hours, because I have received a lot of similar feedback. Initially it was one of the biggest things preventing me from wanting to actually attempting building it. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I can foster a community around it in my local area only, that would be a success for me. The nearby functionality would still work at a local level. If it grew from there, that would be even more of a success. I think with any network that’s designed to be fragmented like this, there’s always going to be places in which it doesn’t take off or not enough people adopt it, but that shouldn’t really affect whether or not it’s a success at the local scale. So I’ve decided not to let that factor deter me.

I see your point on just using, let’s say, an instance of Lemmy for my local town. This is a fair point, the solution might already be out there, but it uses a toolset that’s designed for generic conversation, and not conversation around a location – like, perhaps a specific location that I want to see or place on a map and talk about it. This is the functionality that I’m personally craving.

It’s such a joy to read this kind of feedback, and to know that not only would it be enjoyable to have such a platform, but you can foresee that it would be useful. I think I might ask some developers who have experience with building decentralised platforms to see if they think there would be technical issues.

Hey, it’s good to know that others have been considering this sort of thing.

My article does detail solutions to some of the issues you’ve raised here, but I’ll go over them each just to see where our visions differ:

I can’t share the post with that friend very easily

All posts will have a publicly available URL. I don’t think it would be good to create closed communities, only solutions that would show the user local posts.

If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused

I don’t believe we should validate that people actually live in the community. I think administration of blocking malicious users should work just like Lemmy, but I don’t think the potential for abuse is quite as high, given that the reward for a spammer would be to spam to such a small amount of people. There’s less work in spamming to a larger group by choosing just about any other type of community.

Do you have to abandon your old account and start over?

You don’t, just like Lemmy and Mastodon, your account on one instance could be used to interact with other instances. The Connecting Instances section of the article details how this could work from a technical point.

It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right

Distributed cost and administration is exactly how I see it. I would only care to host my local instance.

Hey, thanks the feedback.

That would be one of the ways that I’d use the home functionality, but the categorisation would allow for more niche subjects than just generic local conversation, such as treasure hunting games or historical photos etc. Also, the nearby feature would make it more of a utility for travelling and sightseeing.

I think you’re right in that uptake would be a challenge, but I personally think that would primarily be due to the paradox of not joining a community because it’s empty. It’s something that I mention in the article. I don’t know if it’s something that can be overcome, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.