this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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Introducing Habitat - A Social Platform for Local Communities (feddit.uk)
submitted 1 day ago by carlnewton@feddit.uk to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
78 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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[–] Alfredolin@sopuli.xyz 4 points 9 hours 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 16 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] richardwonka@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 hours ago

integrate it with #flohmarkt (and the fediverse in general) and you don't need to reinvent the wheel :-)

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

What features are you thinking? To put a price on a post/mark as sold etc?

[–] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 3 points 5 hours ago

I agree with the user above, over here facebook is so entrenched not just thanks to the location-based groups and tagging but through the marketplace too. People rely on it to sell their old stuff. Of course the main hurdle as usual is making people care enough to use a different thing, even though the current solution works well enough for their use case. I could see it happening if towns adopted it officially and there was a bit of communication about it. Does your program federate with other instances ? like, if I want to sell my old table, will people in nearby towns that are hosting their own instance see my post ?

In any case great initiative

[–] Buffy@libretechni.ca 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 9 points 23 hours ago

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

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

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 10 acronyms.

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

[–] gilokee@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

good bot

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 86 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 24 points 1 day 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 20 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] BurgerBaron@piefed.social 4 points 20 hours ago

During covid an anonymous neighbor put an invite in my mailbox. Gave nextdoor a go. First thing I see is a lady posting about chem trails and an obvious scam ad for a used Honda Accord. Uninstalled same day.

[–] spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

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[–] dil@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

A local bulletin board basically would be nice if thats what this is, not using facebook

Edit: Idk how I wrote "board" as "born"

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 9 points 1 day ago

It could certainly be used like that. For me personally, I like the idea of discussing local areas of beauty, monuments, history of the area etc

[–] InFerNo@lemmy.ml 1 points 20 hours ago

We have a very strong national use of Hoplr, so it'll be really hard to get people over and I haven't seen any malpractice by Hoplr yet.

[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is this NextDoor but for communists?

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 8 points 1 day 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 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Hopefully not just communists

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 4 points 22 hours ago

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

[–] MoreZombies@quokk.au 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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?

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Could you help me understand what you mean by "hosting community events"? Your users can create posts about events, but it has no tools for video calls or anything like that. Users can create posts in the categories created by the administrator. They can leave comments on those posts. There are a bunch of moderation tools and ability for the administrator to have settings for posts based on the category they're in.

[–] nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I'm guessing they mean like facebook events? A distinct section of the platform that allows for some kind of invite system, a feed for just the event, and reminders.

[–] carlnewton@feddit.uk 4 points 21 hours ago

Ah I see. No, no specialised type of post for events, date based information, invite systems, or anything like that. I can see why that would be good though so I'll give it some thought.

[–] rodneylives@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day 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.

[–] eodur@piefed.social 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] quick_snail@feddit.nl 7 points 1 day ago (15 children)

Does it support Activity Pub?

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