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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.
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 And regarding Identity: This will be its own server with a separate identity/account from your daily Mastodon ID. Although you could always link the two with rel=me tags, I don't have an easy way for you to use this to post from a remote server.
But interestingly, @julian has been championing the use of the ActivityPub API for more sophisticated emote interactions. Perhaps in the future we'll have a way to do this.
Regarding location privacy, this only requires *A* location, not *YOUR* location. So, you could always just type in an address you want to share.
I'm working to build in something for people to use the location services on their device to look up their exact location, but this would be something users would opt-in to for every post.
But to show up on a map, SOME kind of location will be required. Otherwise, you'd be better off posting from Mastodon, and not Atlas.
Re: I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server for the #Fediverse.
@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.
Re: Re: I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server...
@julian @osma @benpate I don’t 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.
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/
@benpate love what you’ve done so far. Can see so many uses. There’s a definite need to have ‘private’ tags / entries as well as public ones.
@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?
@benpate Ben this is so impressive!
I can’t come up with coherent comments or questions just now but I’m definitely tuned in and pondering how this connects to all my Future Cities/civic tech tangles.
Cc @samnabi this is one of the “somebody had an idea sometime around FediForum two weeks ago and now there’s a whole new dimension…” things I was trying to explain. I will include Ben’s FediCON talk in what I send you, as well.
Re: Excited to show off Atlas - a social mapping server...
@benpate That's really nice. I retroactively added my destination content as Articles with location properties a while back. I really need to write some more of those so hopefully they’re discoverable.
Edit: Honestly I really wanted to use Place rather than Article, but most implementations have a hard time dealing with Place objects.
Re: I'm excited to show off #Atlas - a social mapping server for the #Fediverse.
@benpate@mastodon.social this is super super cool. Are you integrating with places.pub as well?
cc @evan
Sure, doing taxiteam (German yellow cabs). Described some aspects in https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/582
Would be interested e.g. in finishing the federated geocoding part together.
@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 :)
cool. I am doing funded work for taxiteam and menschys and for redaktor (CMS) and Public Spaces Incubator (EBU and Public Broadcasters), fulltime, anyway :)
About places.pub - did post the code to federate OSM a long while ago https://gist.github.com/sebilasse/ca76c60955e5414cff2c253f1cd89af4
this snippet comes with a bunch of other modules.
An OSM to JSON-LD proxy like places.pub is super nice but what we need in taxiteam is a bit more.
Our database is a consolidated cache of OSM and wikidata knowledge but organized as hierarchical Collections, both political-administrative as well as by geohash.
So, if you are down to Country "DE"
https://gist.github.com/sebilasse/9b4c50bfabad43879c9c43c3adbe9ca1 it is a Collection of Federal States with its own id (2nd file).
With ActivityPub, we have the ability to define these hierarchies starting by Collection Q2 having the M49 regions as items with ['Collection', 'CollectionPage'] and that goes down to e.g. country/state/adm3/city/district/suburb/"hood" …
🧵 1/3
The hoods have then all the street addresses, relations, boundaries like places.pub (with icons cached static etc. pp).
So, you know all the administrative parents from any address -
but what makes it really special is that any taxiteam instance could add info to any address (just as with your annotated places …).
As said, described it just very briefly in https://github.com/w3c/activitystreams/issues/582
It includes federated _reverse_ geocoding too but Lat/Long would not be cool for this, so we use geohash for the Service Actor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash https://geohash.softeng.co/
Let's see a practical example:
A new fair 
taxiteam forms in any city to "FCK UBER". They install an instance and choose a geohash they would like to geocode.
E.g. the square for Hamburg and some other cites.
These might overlap, it doesn't matter cause geohash is strictly hierarchical too.
We do also have a server for all Germany by default, anyway:
The instance once fetches the cache of needed infos up to street addresses.
🧵 2/3
Then it once sends an Update to all attached taxiteam machines meaning „Hey there, we are new and geocode ["u1"]“ (or ["u1r","u1w","u1x"]) then the network knows.
Now any taxidriver can add infos, warnings etc. directly.
Next time when a user clicks on a map, we once decode Lat/Long to geohash, if your own instance doen't have it, it can ask the best suited option (e.g. serer proximity, load or trust).
As smaller the instance area is, as more detailed infos about em places ith might have :)
User now knows "You clicked on Fischmarkt Hamburg but unfortunately the area is currently flooded. Flashflood warning, go away" -
well, or maybe " … and your cab arrives in 1 minute" or "… cool exhibition nearby" or whatever.
Sorry if I got either too complicated or short :)
We have frequent team mmetings, next is Saturday but I am also looking forward to the dev meeting with @reiver re. https://digitalcourage.social/@reiver@mastodon.social/115317680720978044
🧵 3/3
@benpate This is awesome. I've been toying with an idea like this for years and it will IMHO be a killer app for AR.
@benpate Sounds like it could be used for reporting ICE? Like those apps that were banned recently.
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