54
Alternative to Google Maps for sharing
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
54 points (98.2% liked)
Privacy
31168 readers
343 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
The what3words app is awesome and lets you share any 10-foot square on the planet and save them into lists.
what3words is proprietary and the owner is profit-hungry and litigious, I would recommend avoiding it.
Some basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Proprietary
Huh, I had no idea that was the case. How does what3words make money exactly? I assume ads but I block those everywhere I use a screen.
Are there any services that do roughly the same thing but are open source?
Basically they license out the system to companies. You can get a rough idea here: https://what3words.com/business
The idea is that by making it free to individuals they build up market familiarity and expectation. Free personal use is just marketing for the paid product. Then they can turn to businesses and convince them that they should offer their system as a service and charge them for it.
The closest alternative is probably Plus Codes. They are driven by Google but are free to use for everything with a pretty plain and simple Terms of Use.
Instead of words they use an alphanumeric encoding. The main downside is that this can be less memorable but the upside is that it works for users of all languages and you can shorten the codes by using a Country or City reference as well as control the precision.