I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server for the #Fediverse. In about two weeks, we've gone from crazy on I70 to a fledgling app that lets me annotate any location on the globe and share it over #ActivityPub
There's still a lot to do. But there's enough here for me to ask for your help. I would love to hear what you think of this short video, and to start talking to everyone out there who's interested in making maps on the Fediverse.
Sure, doing taxiteam for the german yellow cabs. Described some aspects in https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/582
Would be interested in finishing the federated geocoding part together.
@benpate@mastodon.social this is super super cool. Are you integrating with places.pub as well?
cc @evan
@benpate Ben this is so impressive!
I canāt come up with coherent comments or questions just now but Iām definitely tuned in and pondering how this connects to all my Future Cities/civic tech tangles.
Cc @samnabi this is one of the āsomebody had an idea sometime around FediForum two weeks ago and now thereās a whole new dimensionā¦ā things I was trying to explain. I will include Benās FediCON talk in what I send you, as well.
@benpate ooh!
Better Atlas than the other one. A couple of questions:
- are you envisioning this to be a federated Foursquare or Yelp?
- inserting location tags to people's posts increases their personal data exposure quite a lot. What privacy implications do you see here?
- I didn't catch in the video what is the identity model you're basing this on. New identity on Atlas, or a tie-in to an existing fedi identity?
@benpate
@osma@mas.to @benpate@mastodon.social I'd assume that if you're using Atlas that you're explicitly aware that the location data is being broadcast out, yeah?
I'd imagine it to be akin to an opt-in mechanism.
I think we have enough evidence by now to know that even people who should have training to know better, accidentally reveal too much on apps, and that location is a particularly sensitive item.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1978942.1979295
https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/news/a40358143/strava-israeli-military/
@julian @osma @benpate I donāt think that an app should tie my physical location to posting about a location, and it is not necessarily true that you need to be there to talk about that location.
And that could be anything from trip advisor like blog posts and reviews to boosting and chatting about social activism or events happening at a location.
For example, I may want to location tag Yosemite when writing about the current lack of funding to protect the land from human aggression. Or I would want to do so when writing about my experience at the top of Half Dome decades ago as part of a shared human experience.
@benpate Sounds like it could be used for reporting ICE? Like those apps that were banned recently.
@rimu Hey Rimu :)
I'm running this in an iOS simulator just to show the mobile theme, but this is 100% a web app.
There are many uses for this kind of geotagging. I won't be hosting a public Atlas server, but others communities/organizations can launch their own for whatever purposes they need.
@sl007 Yes, I'd love to work together on geocoding, too.
Right now, there's not much to it..
I'm using commercial geocoders to translate addresses into Lat/Long, then including that in 1) the ActivityStream document, and 2) the search results.
I'd love to work with https://places.pub in some way, but I'm not sure (yet) what that integration would look like, or what we'd get out of it.
So yes: let's keep talking about how we make this seamless. There should be one standard, not six :)
Hey Julian..
I would love to integrate with places.pub, and I have this on my list of bookmarks for research.
I'm not sure what that would look like, just yet. Right now, the `Place` isn't its own actor, but just an extra set of data on a `Note`.
Maybe I could use places.pub as a datasource to look up previous addresses? I'm still researching, and would love to get your suggestions :)
@benpate this is pretty exciting! do you have any idea what safety features will look like? would you build something into it that, say, actively prevents others from doxing someone?
I'll build whatever people say is most important. These policies will likely be up to individual server owners.
After spammers found Bandwagon, I've been kicking around ways to do moderation before profiles and posts become public.
But whether we're using maps or toots, the issues would still be the same. Bad actors will need to be identified quickly, and dealt with decisively.
I'm adding this into the project board. Feel free to pile on: https://github.com/orgs/EmissarySocial/projects/3/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=135226795&issue=EmissarySocial%7Cemissary%7C566
@benpate love what youāve done so far. Can see so many uses. Thereās a definite need to have āprivateā tags / entries as well as public ones.
@RossA Yes. And this is a really good point.
I'm planning to use Emissary's "Circles" for this (https://emissary.dev/circles) which let you limit posts to certain people. I'll show this in the next video.
And right now, Atlas also has disappearing messages that auto-delete after a set period time.
Nothing on the Fediverse is 100% private; it's always possible a remote server might share your "private" posts with unintended people. But this should help limit comments in most cases.
@benpate Super cool! I wish the README had instructions on how to run this :)
I'm expecting this kind of street-level annotation to have lots of uses, from groups of friends replicating #FourSquare, to communities organizing events, or citizen #Journalists recording what's going on in their neighborhood.
Please share this with anyone who might benefit from sharing location notes online. It's time for me to start collecting some needs from real-world users.
@decibyte Sorry about the README. Right now, Atlas barely runs on my own development laptop.
I've added a lot of new stuff into Emissary to support geolocation, and that still needs to be merged and posted to Github.
But, I'd love to work with you to see this run on your machines - even if it's still an early draft.
I'll have a super-rough-preview release ready in the next few weeks. Let's try to talk then and I'll help you get it running.