✅ Homophobic slur in the screenshot

✅ md5 checksum used to store IP address of “anonymous” posts

✅ Choose your own adventure ID generation

✅ Hardcoded admin credentials

✅ Optional CSRF protection

✅ JSON everything!

✅ All CSS, JS, PHP and HTML in one file

✅ “The server stores ciphertext and nothing else” - I beg your pardon?

Discord had better watch out!

It is currently not federated, and I should be careful with my words because people often confuse my intent when I talk about this. Federation is planned but ActivityPub is not. More details on this are on github.

Listen, I’m going to shamelessly self promote my project all I can! Also PHP, also Symfony: Habitat is a platform for local communities. I don’t think PHP gets enough love! It’s incredibly versatile and is actually very fast in recent years.

I feel that there’s something you’ve implied in there that isn’t explicit.

For instance:

It makes high-quality posts look the same as low-quality ones.

How does it do that?

that format is not good since lots of people will start to automatically block them

Why would they do that?

You’re really going to have to dumb it down for me, and I might not be alone given the number of down votes this post, and your comments get when you mention it.

I’ve read your comments, I’ve read the post, and I honestly still don’t understand the issue.

Mate! It was you who commented something to this effect on my post a while back! I’m trying to understand what you mean, I really am, but it’s not going in. Could you humour me, and explain to me what it is about an image accompanying a text post that makes it bad? Is it that so very often when an image accompanies an article you’ve seen so many instances of it being low quality content that you’re conditioned to assume the same even when it isn’t the case?

Yeah I’ll be making some changes to it at some point.

Hey, thanks again. Just to let you know, the map on the about page is in the latest release 1.1.0.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

:D This is great news for everyone except for the creature.

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.

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.

I was also running it on an aws ec2 t3.micro instance with no issue. I only switched to host it locally because I wanted to build for those who own home labs also, and I didn’t want to pay the ~£20 a month for the micro instance.

I’m running my instance from a refurbished Dell Optiplex 5060. It’s a very low power light weight computer. Maybe not as light-weight as a raspberry pi though, I’m not sure on that.

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

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.

Federation has always been in the plan. Success for an individual instances is all the matters to any given owner, not success globally. The owner of an instance must have a vested interest in fostering their local community.