cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160218
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/45160073
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.
Where can I get more info on this, like how to join?
It's distributed -- you'll need to create an instance for your own area. To do so, take a look at the getting started section: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started
More information of what it is and how it's planned to be in the future is in my previous blog posts:
I'm kind of a noob here, so forgive me if this is a silly question, but: what kind of hardware would I need to self-host a server? I'm guessing a raspberry-pi wouldn't cut it. So would I need to rent server space?
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.
Thanks mate. I’ll look at that tomorrow.