I built mirrorspace.net (beta up at https://app.mirrorspace.net/) which is a "mirror space" i.e. a virtual layer ontop of our normal physical space. Users can browse nearby landmarks (currently based on geolookup wikipedia entries) and also upload their own media. But the catch is, for anyone else to view your media and interact with it, they need to be within 50m of the upload location. This mechanic is meant to drive a dual virtual/physical interaction that gives a more holistic and potentially a more meaningful social media experience.
My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader.
I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)
This is really cool even in its current form! Was very interesting to learn some new details about the local landmarks (center of Brussels). How did you determine the precise position on the map for the articles ?
I have a long time toyed with the idea of notes-photos-locations-time-internet activity interspersed into a single environment, which would allow to find things by association.
Having this onto a private hosted instance might be a very nice approach to increasing invasiveness of the device manufacturers by just making them thin terminals onto your own “activity content hub”.
I also think a hosted version, or secure (yeah I know) account for personal geospatial note type things would be useful; e.g. mark a location for a reminder to do something the next time you are nearby (store X has a sale, location Y has live music daily at 1300)
Wow, that’s cool! (and chilling for that flight article…)
I was thinking of an explicit personal instance (which may have selected shared components in a ballpark similar way as the open social does it), because the latest events with Apple triggered me to think again of a deaggregated personal device: a separate unit for mobile internet, a separate unit for GPS, a separate unit for camera, etc., all pushing the data to a “personal network cache NAS”, and replicating to the central personal server. This way the peripheral units can be made quite small, simple and modular, and the complicated logic can sit server side… I suppose it’s quite a drift from what you had as a use case, but FWIW :-)
Hmmm yep, that is interesting. I am going down a similar route, but by replacing my phone with something that will become my primary computing device (either a pi-based cyberdeck, or something like the librem5). I want to effectively just carry around a SD card or small SSD with all my data, all the time. The peripheral to access this doesn't really matter to me. I never call anyone using cell networks, and only rarely use signal if I need voice/video chat which I do over wifi anyway. I guess I could also load English wikipedia onto it and directly run mirrorspace as localhost on my device...
The main blocker for me is that my partner wants to always be able to reach me in an emergency... haven't found a solution for that one yet.
My idea was to add search filters, commenting, voting etc. and allow people to "feel" how people currently interact with any location - so if I fly to SF from Berlin, I can immediately browse the mirrorspace and see what people are doing specifically where I am now, and also get a handle on the social fabric of that place. I wanted to have a platform that records significant events in a temporal way, maybe protests or similar - things that define each city/place uniquely. The monetisation strategy was to allow people to pay the platform to increase the visibility radius of their posts, and/or allow people to pay to view media items from outside the normal radius - where a share of this payment goes to the uploader.
I was fucking around for a few years on this, and now I have another major project to work on so no longer have time or motivation to "finish" it. I might open source it in the future, if anyone is interested. (I haven't looked at the code in months)