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🆕 blog! “Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap”

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spendi…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/

#ActivityPub #fediverse #FOURSQUARE #geolocation #OpenStreetMap

in reply to Terence Eden

OK gang! I now have an *extremely* basic ActivityPub server which can send messages to its follower!

Next steps:

* Record who is following it.
* Post to all followers (not just me).
* Stable URl for posts.
* Front end for picking locations nearby.
* About a dozen other things!

in reply to Terence Eden

Nice! My toy server can now:

✅ Record who is following it.
✅ Post to multiple inboxes.
✅ Generate a permalink for its posts.

It doesn't do:
❌ Signature verification
❌ Handling replies, likes, or unfollows (it is a read-only account)
❌ Showing number of followers, posts, etc.

Pretty happy with that.
Next step - a UI so I can actually send custom posts.

in reply to Terence Eden

Not the prettiest page on the web, but I can now Geolocate my phone and find the 25 nearest named places on #OSM.

Next stage is making a button to send that location to my ActivityPub server to send out a message.

(This is crappy code, poorly architected. Just a Proof of Concept.)

#osm
in reply to Terence Eden

I've just reposted a public status from my new location check-in service.

It doesn't handle replies or likes, but you can follow it.

Expect buggy and untested weirdness 🙂

in reply to Terence Eden

It's all working!

You can follow @edent_location for my "FourSquare-style" check-ins to locations.

TODO:

📸 Upload and store photos.
🔣 Set the language text to prevent spurious "Translate" options.
🖼 Make the interface look nice.
🔒 Better security
👨‍💻 Tidy up the source code.

in reply to Terence Eden

I've added a feature request to #Mastodon to display geotags.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29002

#MastoAdmin

in reply to Terence Eden

Image upload works! And those photos percolate through the #fediverse!

I still need to add proper alt text (just a static description for now).

And the UI is 💩

But I'm pretty pleased with how far I've got in a few hours of hacking away.

It is *totally* possible to build a location-based service on top of #OSM and #ActivityPub!

in reply to Terence Eden

Goodness me! The ActivityPub network is chatty.
In the last 6 hours, I've received 371 different messages to my single-user inbox.

Most of which seem to be from servers announcing users have been deleted. They're not users or servers I've seen before.

Is this normal?

#MastoAdmin #MastodonAPI

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