After Madblog, how many of you would like #ActivityPub and #Indieweb support to come to GPSTracker too?
This is an idea that I’ve been flirting with for a while.
Like many Millennials, 10-15 years ago I was into the Foursquare-mania. It was the age where pubs would offer discount to their Foursquare mayor and where people used to share their Foursquare stats and compete on how many badges they had collected.
Then Foursquare decided to pivot its platform towards the business-side instead, the check-in app was spun off into Swarm, it gradually lost users but it gained trackers, and by now I think only 1-2 of my contacts (out of >100 in the golden age) still use it.
By now I don’t think anyone has filled that gap; there isn’t any social media built around networks that share and recommend their check-ins.
#GPSTracker already supports a lot of tracking, timeline and check-in features, synchronization of geo events with mobile devices, and even stats with arbitrary aggregations (by country, time range, city, region etc.). Plus some features that Foursquare never implemented (like searching for checkins on the timeline by simply selecting an area on the map).
#Microformats already support location tags through the h-adr class, although they are rarely used. Both #Webmentions and ActivityPub could send check-in activities as permalinks to pages with those tags. And the #OpenStreetMap APIs could do the heavylifting of retrieving POIs in in a certain lat/long box.
The only hurdle would be implementing the protocols under the hood, as both the Webmentions and Pubby libraries are in #Python while #GPSTracker is in #Typescript. But it could be a good chance to start writing multi-language bindings for those libraries.
Let me know if it’s something that you would use, or even self-host, and if you know if there’s anything in the Fediverse that already fills this niche.
