Gregory's ServerFoursquare are releasing Foursquare Open Source Places as an open data set, to be updated monthly under the Apache 2.0 license. Pretty big news for the geospatial and location data folks. https://location.foursquare.com/resources/blog/products/foursquare-open-source-places-a-new-foundational-dataset-for-the-geospatial-community/
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   @andypiper that's awesome. It'll definitely be extremely helpful for Smithereen — I do need a geographical database for several features that a social network of this style "must" have. That's at least the education section in profiles (schools, universities, etc), and venues in events. I was contemplating how I'm going to try to pull something out of OSM and/or have a community of my users maintain it, now I don't have to. The only problem is that this dataset must be terabytes in size. @andypiper oh wow, the whole thing is actually only about 10.5 GB. That's even more awesome. Totally something that can be imported into MySQL without much trouble. edit: it's compressed so larger than that. Still it's a weird-ass format but at least the official implementation™ for using it is a Java library. I can deal with that.  |
... if you were, say, to think about rebuilding something like Foursquare as a member of the Fediverse using ActivityPub, like this person @Edent has done, this might be an interesting time to do something innovative. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/