What is Habitat?

Habitat is a free and open source platform for local communities to discuss things happening in their area.

Decentralised

Traditional online services are often centralised and owned by large organisations. Those organisations are responsible for moderating content on their platforms and ensuring that their income outweighs the costs of providing their services globally. That income often comes from displaying ads and selling information about the people who use their services.

Habitat is decentralised and can be self-hosted. Anyone can create and host an instance of Habitat for their local area. They can invite members of their local community to discuss all things local. When somebody hosts an instance of Habitat, they are responsible for moderating the content on their Habitat instance alone. A Habitat instance only needs to be available to locals, and so does not need to run on expensive servers. With a bit of technical knowledge, it could even be hosted from a home computer. This means that Habitat is cheap and easy to host. As a result, there is no need to sell information about the people who use it, or target them for ads.

If nobody has yet created an instance of Habitat for your local area, perhaps you could host an instance.

Location at the Heart

Every instance of Habitat exists for an area. Perhaps that area is a town or a village. Locals can join that instance to take part in conversations about specific places. It's also possible for locals to open Habitat while out and about to see what conversations are happening nearest to their exact location, whether orchestrating an easter egg hunt or finding out about historical monuments.