Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I've made some good progress recently. I've added the ability to temporarily freeze user accounts, custom WYSIWYG editing for sidebar content and functionality that allows the administrator to set site-wide announcements to appear and disappear at specific dates/times. I also got some great feedback from users of my instance of it for my local town and so fixed some bugs.

- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/

- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat

- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2

Love the idea!

Thanks so much!

Nice idea.

I'd encourage you to embrace full decentralization via blockchain technology. Why? Any successful tech that empowers and connects local communities becomes very politically interesting very quickly.

Thanks. Decentralisation is the aim. I don't think blockchain will be required though, because lat/long coordinates will act as a route directly between instances. I describe this here: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...

Not sure I understand your 'because' here. Blockchain is helpful in making data public and persistent, and not under control on any one individual.

You might also be interested in geohashing as a more user friendly way to group nearby posts, although lat/lon is easier for a cpu.

Perhaps I'm not educated enough with blockchain to see how it can help with Habitat, but I'll investigate it, thanks. I'll also look into geohashing. I've never heard of it before, but I have been thinking about the issue of multiple posts for the same location and how to deal with that, so geohashing might certainly help with that. Thanks again.