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Carl Newton

@ carlnewton @feddit.uk

Posts
7
Comments
65
Joined
2 yr. ago

Web Developer

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Imagine this - you're signed up to your local instance in -- Perth is it? You go for a walk and find a beautiful old building, and want to know more about it. You open up your local Perth instance of Habitat, which you know about because you live in Perth and managed to find that instance, and click the Nearby feed, and the closest discussion to your location is about this very building. This functionality exists in Habitat right now.

    Now imagine that you're on holiday to Oxford in the UK -- I can't imagine why you'd choose our clouds over your sun, but it might be something to do with the old buildings here. You see an interesting old building, and want to know more about it, and open up your Perth Habitat instance, click the nearby feed. Your Perth instance will identify the closest Habitat instance to your location -- it just so happens to have found one called Habitat:Oxford. Your Perth Habitat instance will show you results from the Oxford Habitat instance by proximity. This is why I want to federate instances, so that you don't even have to worry about which instances have the posts relevant to your location, it's all handled by the network.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • To be clear, there is no functionality that federates Habitat instances yet. This work is still to be done. ActivityPub is a protocol for decentralised networks. Though I will not be using ActivityPub, I will build functionality that will allow for a decentralised network of Habitat instances communicating data to each other. This will be federated by definition, but it will not communicate with Lemmy/Mastodon or anything else that uses ActivityPub.

  • Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?

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  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • 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.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • 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.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • It could certainly be used like that. For me personally, I like the idea of discussing local areas of beauty, monuments, history of the area etc

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Could you help me understand what you mean by "hosting community events"? Your users can create posts about events, but it has no tools for video calls or anything like that. Users can create posts in the categories created by the administrator. They can leave comments on those posts. There are a bunch of moderation tools and ability for the administrator to have settings for posts based on the category they're in.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • 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.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • I'm still going! It's been my weekend obsession for two years!

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Not activity pub specifically, but federation has always been in the plan.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • People keep making the comparison. I don't know, I'm not sure what features next door has, but I know it isn't self hosted.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • 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.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • I'm glad you found the translations folder. Support for different languages was always in the plan, I just wanted to see if anyone actually plans on installing and using it before I keep going with that. You'll see it's in progress on the GitHub project board.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • This wasn't my intention. What does it make my post look like?

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • Yes, categories are built in, but act more like labels to the main feed. You can look at a category homepage to see posts only in that category and hide posts from your main feed that belong in a category.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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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.

  • Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

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  • 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.

  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

  • Fediverse @lemmy.ml
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

  • Selfhosted @lemmy.world
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities

  • Fediverse @lemmy.ml
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    I'm Building Habitat

    carlnewton.github.io /posts/building-habitat/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    I'm Building Habitat

    carlnewton.github.io /posts/building-habitat/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.ml
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?

    carlnewton.github.io /posts/location-based-social-network/
  • Fediverse @lemmy.world
    Carl Newton @feddit.uk

    Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place?

    carlnewton.github.io /posts/location-based-social-network/