cabbage

If I had the skills and time to develop a whole new federated platform this is absolutely be what I would work towards. Sadly I have neither.

OsmAnd is a navigation app, it wouldn’t be the right place to start.

My best idea for the easiest possible integration would be to allow for OSM IDs to serve as attachments to posts in the Fediverse (such as mastodon). The lowest effort would be to simply attach ID codes as hashtags. An example of a mastodon post could be:

Impressive, but a little tacky. Worth a visit. 9/10 #OSM #43768260

Here a bot would search for posts with the hashtag #OSM, and include posts with valid numerical OSM IDs as a separate hash tag. Scoring could be included in the text, and be flexible (2/5, 7/10, 87/100), with clients reading the reviews optionally converting them into any form of indicator.

The challenges of this approach (that I have thought of) would be:

1. Adding the tags would need to be automatized somehow. Mastodon’s share functionality could be used to integrate the functionality directly into apps and maps, but this would not work across the Fediverse. OSM IDs are not generally easy to find, so users posting in the format manually is unrealistic. Ideally apps like CoMaps would allow for Fediverse sign-in directly in the app.
2. Content visibility is a challenge unless some centralized service is tagged. Adding a centralized service would add further problems. A solution would be to make the service dependant on tags.pub for guaranteed hashtag visibility.
3. Moderation is another challenge, especially if there is no centralized authority. Mastodon is doing work towards shared blocklists on the Fediverse which might help in this respect. Reviews from users blocked by major blocklists would be rendered invisible.
4. Reviews viewed from the Fediverse wouldn’t automatically link back to the OSM location, leaving Fediverse users with lacking context. Using a form of attachment rather than hashtags could solve this issue, but it would require more development.

The benefits would be that the federated infrastructure doesn’t really need to be developed much - we would just need people to agree on the standard and find ways to display reviews.

An app to post reviews making use of specialized content fields would probably be nice, but I fear anything that requires additional accounts or apps would deter people. Being able to sign in to existing Fediverse accounts inside of map apps and posting reviews directly seems like a better solution.

I’m sure there are many people with more knowledge than me on the matter though, and some of them are probably working on this already. As I said, I’m just daydreaming. :)

I dream of an integration between the Fediverse and OSM, where Mastodon or similar accounts can be used to leave comments on nodes in OSM. Of course it would present a lot of technical challenges, but I feel like it should be possible to get it right.

I have seen Mangrove before, but even with all the goodwill I have for finding an alternative platform for reviews it just does not make sense to me at all. The closest restaurant I could find on the platform is 800 km away from me. Without OSM integration it just seems futile, and without ActivityPub I just don’t see myself contributing content.

I am probably wrong to be critical. It’s seems to be an interesting project attempting to provide an open source solution for the biggest missing feature I identify in the open web at the moment. But right now I find it impossible to use.

I find the disagreement between Cohn and Stewart towards the end to be fascinating. I find it hard to agree or disagree with either. Cohn is looking out for places like the Fediverse - she knows that if the platforms are subjected to regulation that is impossible to live up to for small actors, this will only serve the capitalists. In the US the law would for sure end up serving this purpose because it would be designed by the billionaires themselves, and they would design them in a way that monopolizes the internet even more as they discuss earlier on.

On the other hand, Stewarts is also right. An Instagram feed is not free speech, it’s brain rot and propaganda and ruins society and lives. It needs to be regulated. Just letting then go on as they are while promoting alternatives misses the mark as to the threat posed by these platforms. Cohn seems to have a blind spot here.

I think the EU has reached a reasonable compromise. They regulate very large online platforms - platforms with more than 45 million users in the EU - separately from smaller platforms. So your obligations increase with your number of users. Furthermore, EU regulation has exceptions for open source not-for-profit development, to avoid regulation aimed at big tech from hurting free software.

Interesting enough I keep seeing people on the Fediverse attacking the Digital Services Act as though it’s gonna mean the end of the Fediverse, even though the Commission is actively posting about it on their own Mastodon instance and the EU is actively supporting the development of the Fediverse through NLnet. It seems to me that even in these spaces people fall for big tech propaganda.

Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.

I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.

Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.

I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.

Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.

“We appreciate you want to use our slop service, but unfortunately our email system is guarded by the latest slop technology to prevent any trace amounts of humanity from getting through”

And so the AI slowly slops itself to death.