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.

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!

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!

Even in my relatively liberal U.S. city, Next Door is overrun by Magats who are cheered on and protected by right-wing Magot moderators. It needs to die and this looks like a great replacement.

I’ve built in the ability to hide categories for this kind of reason. I was thinking, for instance, that people who enjoy a good moan can join the “Moaners Club” category, and the rest of us can hide that category from our feeds to get on with the categories we enjoy. Regarding problematic moderators, I have built a moderation log to keep them accountable, and of course, if they don’t show themselves to have good intentions, those with good intentions could create their own instance – I don’t know why I’m going into this kind of detail – you’re on Lemmy after all, you know the score!

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!

That was my bad. I was espousing federation, not AP specifically, and I see that federation is built in to the idea

Agreed. Tried NextDoor years ago and found it was primarily a venue for busybodies, nosy neighbors and HOAs to complain and nag people about nonsense. I love the idea of an app like this, but hate the people who use it the most.

It goes deeper with Nextdoor. During Covid someone living next to a local evangelical church posted pictures of a packed event where no one was wearing a mask. Some of those pictures included the backs of a few kid’s heads.

The church members complained that he was a pedophile(!) and Nextdoor deleted his account, something that could not be done by moderators and required Nextdoor executive approval.

Nextdoor is a Maggot haven from top to bottom.

Out in my neck of the woods, NextDoor wouldn’t be effective. Lots of acreage between people. We don’t take kindly to snoopers and busybodies. We keep an eye on each other, but not in a nosy neighbor kind of way. Now, where my lady friend lives, it’s eat up with NextDoor. She showed me her feed once, I was like ‘You know, I strongly believe America could solve about 50% of their problems with this one simple trick: Mind Your Own Business!‘.

I don’t have a use case OP, but the project looks great. Seems like it would be an obvious NextDoor replacement.

I found it useful for some things. We have a pack of coyotes in town that preys on dogs and occasionally is spotted in the neighborhood. It was also useful for business & contractor recommendations, but have to otherwise agree with you.

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)

……you want us to get together and moan with each other? Buddy! I didn’t know this was that kind of app!

I lack the use case for this service but, it looks good on paper. Nice!

Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots. I’m in the same boat, I try to just ignore them.

Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots.

Could be, but those bots must be programmed to simulate actual Maggots. They don’t know how to spell, capitalize or use punctuation, much less write more than a single barely comprehensible sentence.

It’s a similar story for the multiple Facebook communities for where I live. They handed a lot of bans during covid era while pushing anti-vax rhetoric.

coyotes in town

That’s understandable. However ‘I see Mr Jones left his garbage cans at the road for a third day’ would get a response like ‘Mr Jones here, I just ramset the cans to the sidewalk. Suck it!’.

Hi @carlnewton@feddit.uk , 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.

1. Do you have a list of existing instances somewhere? I looked around in your github and blog site, and could not find that.
   
2. 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 city, what’s to stop someone from spamming posts about the big city nearby? Or a big city plumber from advertising their services?
   
3. 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.

This seems like something that would really benefit from better language support. I saw the translations folder in the repo, but you should probably get it linked up to a Weblate instance or similar and have people contribute different languages asap.

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?

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.

Is there a way community members can vote on things?

Does it support Activity Pub?

Preach!

Is this NextDoor but for communists?

Hopefully not just communists

sounds like that’s planned but maybe not in yet

Any relation to Lucasfilm/Fujitsu Habitat/Habitat II? https://renoproject.org/

It was an early virtual world, running originally on Commodore 64s, later on PCs and (in Japan) Sega Saturn, with a look and style heavily inspired by SCUMM games.

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

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.

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.

Forgive me if any of these questions have obvious answers:

Would Habitat be suitable for hosting community events, or communities in general?

if you ran a hobby group, would your local Habitat be the place to share things? How much control is in the hands of the users vs the administrator?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

How is it federation but not Activitypub specifically? I thought that was the only protocol that currently allows for federation. Are there others? Or other ways?

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.

Oh, I see. Why have you made that choice? I’d understand to keep the subjects towards more community oriented interests, but then, i’m not sure why federation of other community habitats would have any advantages over being separate.

For example, I imagine East Sussex and Alsace-Lorraine wouldn’t have a great degree of things to share between disparate instances like that.

Anyway, i’ve not had a chance to look at your instance yet, so maybe i’ll understand it better when I duck over there for a sticky beak. All sounds very exciting though! Well done!

Like crap. Next time, write an article on your website, add a featured image, and link to that

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.

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.

Ah! Oh cool, but this would take geolocation. I predict that being a hard sell for lemmings.

But as I type that i realise/remember your post here is primarily an introduction for potential instance operators, not so much a user base. So the geolocation as an ‘issue’ is likely far less important (not forgetting a user can just turn it off anyway).

It’s open-source and self-hostable, so it’s for any group

I thought that was the only protocol that currently allows for federation. Are there others? Or other ways?

The Matrix and XMPP both support federation, though those are mainly for chat platforms

I’m guessing they mean like facebook events? A distinct section of the platform that allows for some kind of invite system, a feed for just the event, and reminders.

Ah I see. No, no specialised type of post for events, date based information, invite systems, or anything like that. I can see why that would be good though so I’ll give it some thought.

Activitypub is not the only one, no.

I predict that being a hard sell for lemmings.

Eh, if it’s an open-source application where you can review the code to confirm that the software isn’t tracking you, then it’s not an issue. Especially if you’re running Graphene OS, Rethink DNS, or Exodus to either sandbox or monitor your traffic

Though I will not be using ActivityPub

If you don’t mind my asking, what drove the decision to not base it on ActivityPub. On the surface that seems to be an easier starting point that building evetything out from scratch

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #129 for this comm, first seen 2nd Mar 2026, 17:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Don’t listen to them. This post renders fine on both voyager and default Web mobile UI for world. You did nothing wrong.

During covid an anonymous neighbor put an invite in my mailbox. Gave nextdoor a go. First thing I see is a lady posting about chem trails and an obvious scam ad for a used Honda Accord. Uninstalled same day.

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

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

Eh, if it’s an open-source application where you can review the code to confirm that the software isn’t tracking you, then it’s not an issue.

you can’t review what’s running on the actual server, what did your local admin add to it.

We have a very strong national use of Hoplr, so it’ll be really hard to get people over and I haven’t seen any malpractice by Hoplr yet.

Look at gamedate.org, or for immediate context search it on YouTube, you may be able to implement a copycat tool with more general lists of common events than the games list the site uses.

ostensibly, there is no need to send your location anywhere, as everything could be set up to be done client-side where you get a registry of published instance locations and sort them by distance to your current location.

Activity Pub doesn’t take advantage of the unique solution we have by knowing the user’s location and the location of instances. In a way, it seems overkill for what we want. Additionally, I don’t necessarily want other software communicating with Habitat. You never know, I might change my mind as I delve into it. I changed my mind on a great number of things as I came to develop them for phase 1. I accept that there are things about existing protocols that I don’t fully understand.

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.

What features are you thinking? To put a price on a post/mark as sold etc?

One could simply infer the location history from the logs though.

only if the data gets sent. it’s doesn’t have to be.

It makes your post look like an image (low quality) instead of a link or discussion (possibly high quality).

So two mobile devices/UIs? Did you even understand the problem?

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.

Yes. And it looks perfectly fine, like any other post, just with an image appearing as the thumb instead of the text-only icon.

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/9c9dac83-8fc5-4547-afe2-9ec1fd91cde2.jpeg

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/88b4cd0e-676f-41a3-9aba-6afeb1f360b6.jpeg

I’m on Summit and it’s obvious from your post title and screenshot in my feed that this will be you presenting some kind of website or software. When clicked, the actual thread has your main post written out nicely.

I think if a filter like what’s described is on its way, it’s very poorly thought-out. Many interesting topics will include images; an album cover when discussing a band, your cat when asking for advice about said cat, etc. It’s also fairly normal on Lemmy to add alt-text of images as plain text in the main post, so a filter would either include such posts as not image-only or exclude posts like yours. Seems like a bad system. I should think it’s better for users to block meme comms.

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

integrate it with #flohmarkt (and the fediverse in general) and you don’t need to reinvent the wheel :-)

good bot

Keep in mind that OP’s project is already based 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

you can’t review what’s running on the actual server, what did your local admin add to it.

You could level that accusation at any software running on a remote server, including the Fediverse

most fediverse software does not collect precise geolocation though, which is why this point was brought up

Is this next-door for non boomers?

Sadly it will never take off but cool idea.

Did you even understand the problem?

The answer is no, not yes.

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