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.
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 "Good Christian" church members complained that he was a pedophile and Nextdoor deleted his account! This could not be done by moderators and required Nextdoor executive approval.
Nextdoor is a Maggot haven from top to bottom.