A federated internet archive, I’m wondering whether I should build it myself. With so many journalists being banned for reporting the gaza genocide we need more ways to combat censorship.
A federated internet archive, I’m wondering whether I should build it myself. With so many journalists being banned for reporting the gaza genocide we need more ways to combat censorship.
Reviews in OpenStreetMap, so that google maps can have a real competitor.
Its not FOSS, but I use to use foursquare for years because of how good it was at finding good restaurants / things to do in a new city. Now that its shut down, there’s no real alternative that comes close.
Well at least googles reviews are now useless, so there is no competition there either.
As an openstreetmap contributor, I wish this so much. Every time I add places in there I ask myself if I’m doing something really useful anf if it’s being actually used by anyone, or if I’m just wasting my time while thinking I’m doing a relevant thing because I know absolutely no one that uses it. Actually, the main osm site doesn’t even show details about businesses, but just the icon
THANK YOU! Please keep contributing! :)
Just wanted to add, when I’m travelling I very much enjoy it when a town has up to date cafes/restaurants. That’s why my highest priority when I contributing to OSM is adding cafe/restaurant information.
Wherever you are, your contributions are very well appreciated! I live in a very small town and use OSM. Idk who mapped this place, but having maps away from Google in such a small place makes me happy. Again, wherever you are, you are contributing to a cause that can help free people from big tech monopolies and actually advances human society forever.
You are part of the reason people like me who don’t have time to contribute to such efforts can use these apps anyways. Part of the reason adoption is possible. Part of the reason OSM can grow beyond just whatever you’re documenting.
Thank you, really. <3
I’m a sporadic/infrequent openstreetmap contributor, too - although I’m not second-guessing these contributions. Useless or not, I do use OSM all the time personally, so reason stands somebody before me did a good job and helped me a lot.
Admittedly, some of the people who use OSM around me use it because at a certain moment I’ve explained them the advantages. (I live in Europe and people frequently use other modes of transport besides the car, so OSM is legit frequently the better choice.)
I’m from Brazil, and the people around here love to swim and bathe in big tech, unfortunately. I tried talking about osm with a lot of people, but everyone keep using google no matter what :(
But recently, I have been giving less attention to adding businesses and more into other things related to navigation, which I know are used by some
Personally, I exercise the “growth mentality” here. Meaning, I don’t compare with a target value such as “I’ve converted 10% of the Earth population to OSM”. Instead, I compare with OSM as it was 6 months ago. This approach gives peace of mind and steady progress for me personally.
There are some people working on this and proposing some options.
IMO, as someone who regularly edits OSM, the maps need much more info and basic editing before reviews. I had to add many of my fave restaurants. Forget about reviews when the restaurants aren’t even on there. Just saying. Maybe as it gets more users.
(Tangent: I was just in a foreign country where I didn’t have much mobile data. But I had downloaded OSM maps beforehand and made edits beforehand for my trip. The only downside is that OSMand doesn’t update their maps very often in some places so I almost never got to use all my edits. Overall though the offline maps were very helpful for navigation, etc.)
If you have OSMand, you would be interested to know about the Live Updates feature, which lets you download newer versions of maps on top of your existing downloaded maps, kind of like a software patch. The feature states that you can download map updates as recent as one hour, but I’ve personally seen the “patches” reflect the changes as soon as 15-20 minutes into upload.
To view live updates, assuming you didn’t heavily customise your OSMand interface:
Once the steps have been followed, you show see something like this below the title of the bottom sheet:
“Updated: Today - <current time>. Includes OSM changes made until <current timestamp>.”
If you see this, you can go back to the map and verify that the changes have been included without downloading the entire map of the location from scratch. The “patches” are only a few MBs at most and you can set the live updates to happen automatically on an hourly, daily or weekly basis.
I was recently in a different country and two of us were navigating an area that had been built up over the last three years. Only OSM had the streets and buildings. Google was way behind and would have been useless.
So for those people editing, thank you, it actually matters.
I don’t know if there’s such thing but i wish there was a foss alternative for street view too
I also use Mapillary, I guess it is similar to Panoramax, cause it has the app and it’s well done.
Mapillary has the best coverage compared to the alternatives but it’s owned by Meta. It’s still much more open compared to Google but I figured the ownership is worth noting.
It’s nowhere close to Street view’s quality or quantity, but there is Panoramax
There’s Instant Street View, tho it’s just I guess a wrapper (???) for Google SV.
from the About button:
Holy crap I forgot about four square!