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.

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.

Nice that doesn’t sound too hard

A lot of the pressure is due to people transitioning to Mint from Win10 without understanding that they’re moving to an XWS system rather than Wayland. If you want Wayland, go with Arch/Cachy. If you want stability, stick with Mint and X11.

I don’t generally recommend Silverblue or Bazzite to newbies, as there’s generally much less documentation and help if they run into problems, and if they ever need an app that isn’t flatpak’ed, it’d be very daunting and offputting for them to then figure out Distrobox or Toolbox to install it. Fine for more experienced folk, but at least until they become the default, I personally think it best to stick with regular Fedora or Mint, depending on the hardware requirements.

YouTube is full of Bazzite tutorials. Whatever is out there at documentation is also quite recent. When people ask ChatGPT about how to do something on Ubuntu or Mint, the answers are generated from 15 years old forum posts. Often not only unusable but also damaging. My expectationnis that for immutable distributions LLM answers in 15 years will not break the OS. At worst it’ll recommend some tool deleted from Flathub and it’ll merely not work instead of breaking everything.