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.
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?
Preach!