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.
Next Lemmy update is going to have an option to block image posts (to remove low quality meme threads). People should stop turning text posts into image posts to avoid being blocked. I also find these hybrid posts quite annoying. You’re making your post look like something it’s not.
Preach!
A post introducing a graphical web-based system would be remiss if an image of that graphical system was missing.
Of course you can block those posts (if that function is.enabled) , but you’d be missing out on many discussions.
This wasn’t my intention. What does it make my post look like?
Like crap. Next time, write an article on your website, add a featured image, and link to that
Don’t listen to them. This post renders fine on both voyager and default Web mobile UI for world. You did nothing wrong.
So two mobile devices/UIs? Did you even understand the problem?
Yes. And it looks perfectly fine, like any other post, just with an image appearing as the thumb instead of the text-only icon.
Another idea you could potentially add down the line: what about functionality similar to Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace? Those tend to work by helping you focus on your local area as opposed to EBay.
Granted, Craigslist is largely fine imo, I’m just proposing a way to help you kill off Facebook
integrate it with #flohmarkt (and the fediverse in general) and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel :-)
Keep in mind that OP’s project is already based on a different protocol than the Fediverse for their own reasons. Trying to create and maintain a bridge between different protocols might be more work than to just make modifications to posts in the current system.
Other factors are end user experience and branding. Keep in mind that the average Facebook/NextDoor user isn’t tech-savvy, and could also be put off by the weird software names commonly found in the Fediverse
It’s likely worthwhile for OP to look into flohmarkt, but integration might not be the optimal method
What features are you thinking? To put a price on a post/mark as sold etc?
I agree with the user above, over here facebook is so entrenched not just thanks to the location-based groups and tagging but through the marketplace too. People rely on it to sell their old stuff. Of course the main hurdle as usual is making people care enough to use a different thing, even though the current solution works well enough for their use case. I could see it happening if towns adopted it officially and there was a bit of communication about it. Does your program federate with other instances ? like, if I want to sell my old table, will people in nearby towns that are hosting their own instance see my post ?
In any case great initiative
Thanks for this. Regarding your point on on making people care, I’ve just written up a post that touches on this: https://feddit.uk/post/45292700
Federation is not yet built in, but I have a plan. There are some details here: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/#connecting-instances
This is perfect for me since I was banned from the NextDoor app for letting my community know the creature was hunting. I can host this for myself and others, and the nonbelievers can walk amongst it.
:D This is great news for everyone except for the creature.
I love the sound of this. Kind of a decentralized Next door but better? I’ve been really wanting a place for some local communities to organize that isn’t Facebook. Perhaps I’ll spin up an instance and see if I can get some interest.
Awesome! Let me know how you get on!
That looks neat! Thanks for posting it!
Looks cool! I’d love to see local buynothing groups have a Fediverse alternative.
Out of curiosity, is there any standard or common format around location data for Fediverse platforms?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #129 for this comm, first seen 2nd Mar 2026, 17:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I absolutely love this idea. Does it support ActivityPub? And I would love to see users can set labels on themselves like what expertise they can offer etc.
Now that’s an interesting idea!
This release is step one in the plan. Federation is step two! More information on this here: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
I love what activitypub has done for the internet, but I don’t think it will be right for this project, but yes to federation – if there are instances to federate with of course!
It seems to me that activity pub could still be useful for a couple of reasons. If you live in the suburbs of a city, then bring able to also access an instance for your suburb and your city might be useful.
And if you live in multiple locales, or if want to stay connected to your old home town etc
Please do have a read of this: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-network/#connecting-instances
I feel quite confident that a gossip protocol approach is the right way to go, but seamless connectivity to other instances is absolutely planned!
Reading through your link, it seems like the main difference in your framework is that there’s auto-propogation of federation built in. Please correct me if I missed anything
Unrelated point: before you throw too much time and effort into building up federation, I want to bring something in the Matrix vs. XMPP debate: caching.
Apparently in Matrix, if a user on server A joins a chatroom on server B, then all of the content on the chatroom need to then be copied and synced to server A. There’s 2 primary problems with this: it’s a lot of duplication overhead that can limit scaling of the network and there’s legal consequences for server A caching potentially illegal content. There’s also a privacy concern as this means more parties that can see various interactions.
XMPP gets around these problems by having the user on server A just directly connect with server B, without server A caching anything.
I haven’t dug into too many of the differences myself, but wanted to bring it up in case it helped
Yes, this is a good point! I don’t necessarily want to slow one Habitat down when waiting for the response of another. It could lock up other requests. If it’s possible to send the user the url to retrieve posts with frontend javascript, that may definitely be worth looking into. It sounds like an XSS minefield though, but it could very well be the way to go.
Thanks for this.
That was my bad. I was espousing federation, not AP specifically, and I see that federation is built in to the idea
I would totally host that for my neighborhood, which as I understand is using Facebook a lot, which, of course, I am avoiding like the pest.
Hi @[email protected] , 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.
- Do you have a list of existing instances somewhere? I looked around in your github and blog site, and could not find that.
- 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?
- 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.
Hello!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Is there a way community members can vote on things?
I don’t have a use case OP, but the project looks great. Seems like it would be an obvious NextDoor replacement.
Is this next-door for non boomers?
Sadly it will never take off but cool idea.
I like the idea. I don’t want to use facebook or similar, but that’s where stuff like “BuyNothing” is most active.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much about self hosting (beyond what I’ve picked up working in software development) so I don’t see myself running one of these myself. I’d probably use it if it came to my neck of the woods (NYC)
A local bulletin born basically would be nice if thats what this is, not using facebook
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
