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Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities (feddit.uk)
submitted 1 month ago by carlnewton@feddit.uk to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[-] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 5 points 1 month ago

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!

[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago

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

[-] Lonewolfmcquade@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago

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!'.

[-] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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!'.

[-] ramenshaman@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Pretty sure a decent amount of them are bots. I'm in the same boat, I try to just ignore them. Next-door is nice for getting rid of stuff you don't need, otherwise I would uninstall it.

[-] perishthethought@piefed.social 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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 small 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.

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

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.
[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 6 points 1 month ago

Is this NextDoor but for communists?

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Hopefully not just communists

[-] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

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

[-] eodur@piefed.social 4 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 4 points 1 month ago

Does it support Activity Pub?

[-] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

sounds like that's planned but maybe not in yet

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

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

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl 4 points 1 month ago

Is there a way community members can vote on things?

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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 start contribute different languages asap.

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] MoreZombies@quokk.au 2 points 1 month ago

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?

[-] dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 4 points 1 month ago

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!

[-] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

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

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

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!

[-] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 month ago

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

[-] Pika@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

If I understand the project right, this would be a great opening for non-profit communities to make a page for the town and add the services, instead of the typical static pages

[-] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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

Fewer Letters More Letters
AP WiFi Access Point
DNS Domain Name Service/System
XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol ('Jabber') for open instant messaging

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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

[-] rodneylives@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Alfredolin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

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

[-] jtrek@startrek.website 0 points 1 month ago

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)

[-] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] Cyber@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

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

[-] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 month ago

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

[-] Anon518@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

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

[-] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago

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

[-] quick_snail@feddit.nl -1 points 1 month ago

Preach!

[-] Buffy@libretechni.ca 0 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] carlnewton@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

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

this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
70 points (98.6% liked)

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