I'm working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover and discuss their local area. The plan is for it to be federated.

In the last month or so I've been solely focused on plans and content for my instance for my local town, so there hasn't been any programming for a little while but I'll be jumping back into it in weeks to come.

- 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

I love this "local first" focus, which for me translates into "relevant first". My app Plantshare (posted about it in this HN post) is not very useful if you're the only user for 40km around, but I've seen local pockets of signups that gain momentum and are then useful in that locality and the users make local connections.

I think the biggest hurdle for this would be to gain traffic in place of an existing entrenched local Facebook group or similar.