Hey, I gave this a watch but their use of the word ‘local’ doesn’t match mine in this case. When I use the word local, I’m referring to a geographic area, or at least a server that represents a geographic area. It looks like when local-first talk about local, they’re referring to interaction on a device. It would be nice to be able to have habitat not require an internet connection to queue a post, this is a great idea and I’ll look into that, but their point on “it should still work on device if the remote server is down (or even disappears forever)” I don’t believe is possible when we’re building a community platform. Or, at least, if such a thing is possible, I wouldn’t know where to begin. I appreciate the heads-up though, I love that such a group exists.

I haven’t, but I will absolutely look at this on the weekend! Thanks so much

Thanks for this! 😃 I have been going back and forth on the idea of providing the end user with the ability to create their own categories. I was wondering whether it would be better to have an Other type category which the admin can react to and create categories as needed, but your post has pushed me back to the idea of allowing category creation. I think if I do implement that, I’ll have a switch for it, so that the instance admin can choose.

Thanks! Worst case scenario is that I’ll learn a lot and have fun doing so.

😀 that’s great to hear! Thanks

Hey, you asked to be kept updated, so I thought I’d let you know that I have been working on Habitat: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

It’s such a joy to read this kind of feedback, and to know that not only would it be enjoyable to have such a platform, but you can foresee that it would be useful. I think I might ask some developers who have experience with building decentralised platforms to see if they think there would be technical issues.

Hey, it’s good to know that others have been considering this sort of thing.

My article does detail solutions to some of the issues you’ve raised here, but I’ll go over them each just to see where our visions differ:

I can’t share the post with that friend very easily

All posts will have a publicly available URL. I don’t think it would be good to create closed communities, only solutions that would show the user local posts.

If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused

I don’t believe we should validate that people actually live in the community. I think administration of blocking malicious users should work just like Lemmy, but I don’t think the potential for abuse is quite as high, given that the reward for a spammer would be to spam to such a small amount of people. There’s less work in spamming to a larger group by choosing just about any other type of community.

Do you have to abandon your old account and start over?

You don’t, just like Lemmy and Mastodon, your account on one instance could be used to interact with other instances. The Connecting Instances section of the article details how this could work from a technical point.

It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right

Distributed cost and administration is exactly how I see it. I would only care to host my local instance.

Hey, thanks the feedback.

That would be one of the ways that I’d use the home functionality, but the categorisation would allow for more niche subjects than just generic local conversation, such as treasure hunting games or historical photos etc. Also, the nearby feature would make it more of a utility for travelling and sightseeing.

I think you’re right in that uptake would be a challenge, but I personally think that would primarily be due to the paradox of not joining a community because it’s empty. It’s something that I mention in the article. I don’t know if it’s something that can be overcome, but I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.