HexAtlas
hex-atlas.netlify.app

Hello and warm greetings to my fellow news mega enjoyers and to the wider hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml community,

I've been finding myself browsing the newsmega often and was often thinking of a way that would help me contextualize the discussions and news that I'm reading. I remembered an atlas I had in school that would show the location of industries and natural ressources (and more) and decided try to recreate a digital version similar to https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/. When I stumbled upon lemmy-js-client I found a fun way to display lemmy comments geographically, which I would like to share with you:

https://hex-atlas.netlify.app/

⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden

Nexus Features:

I'm open for suggestions, but would like to continuously add new features:

  • Mastodon.social (well documented)
  • Marxists.org (will be difficult)
  • Moon of Alabama (looks easy) (Thank you @someone@hexbear.net for pointing out the transphobia)
  • Usability and performance improvements
  • and maybe more cool features where the guiding ideas are: "IRL Victoria 3 UI" and a "cockpit for newsmega-enjoyers" (e.g. comparing regions and seeing commodity/capital flows, real-time 1% flight data, vessel data - to enjoy the ansar allah blockade, virgin chad ranking, etc.)

Basic usage:

  • You can either search for a place or click on it. You'll see various scopes: provinces/territories, countries, intermediate regions, sub regions, continent. You can click also on these to change the scope. What it actually does is send it as a search query into lemmy and you see the search results to it (I built a fancy search page). IN the Fediverse Tab you can select the instances, sort types, and other settings from lemmy. On the Nexus Tab you have a similar behaviour, just for the various modules. You'll see the wiki of whatever is selected on the map :

  • use query to search location by query e. g. brics and find discussions pertaining to the selected location.

  • the query field can also be used to find and filter content by communities that are not listed

  • on Mobile long press pictures to unblur it (not fully tested) on desktop hover with mouse

tldr: Attention [Pink]: Select an option [Purple] to reveal selected information [Yellow].

It's in a prototype stage so please keep in mind:

  • ⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden ⚠️

  • It's mostly optimized for desktops. Sry comrades with old hardware - no optimization, yet :( @kota@hexbear.net post inspired me to look into this tho.

  • Provinces/Territories: While I was doing manual edits to some regions I realized I'm doing something very political (duh). Following this, I'm looking for solutions to implement user defined regions (if there's interest from you) e.g. #fromTheRiverToTheSea #brics #udssr #whatever Comrade @SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml offered help, but I have only experience with front-end and am not sure how and what to propose. All my ideas are leveraging the current state of development and might be annoying to you. If you have experience, suggestions, etc. on how to make this work, feel free to start a discussion, reach out, etc.

  • Provinces/Territories: If you want something particularly aggravating changed asap, feel free to start a discussion and vOtE! I'll update manually.

  • Countries that span two continents are only displayed as belonging to one e.g. Russia - Europe (Dataset used: https://github.com/lukes/ISO-3166-Countries-with-Regional-Codes)

  • Right now this project is exclusive to hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml and their federated instances. I have an inner conflict: Generally, fuck intellectual property and I would like to make it foss, but this would make it available for lib/chud content as well. Should I? Help me resolve this.

  • No login implemented

Please consider this a tribute to this community, which I've been lurking and a member since the r/CTH days (nevar forget). I started web development not too long ago and am deeply inspired by dev titans among others:

@nutomic@lemmy.ml

@dessalines@lemmy.ml

@SleeplessOne1917@lemmy.ml

Thank you and the mods and admins for making hexbear/lemmy what it is today.

rat-salute

Enjoy your weekend :)

(After I post this I will leave the computer for a while and wont be able to really check and respond for a few hours)

Death to fascism

Death to capitalism

Death to imperialism

Trans rights are human rights

Show

EDIT: After some consideration I decided to make the code public under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ( AGPL-3.0 license )

https://github.com/hexatlas/lemmy-atlas/

https://git.altesq.net/hex_atlas/lemmy-atlas/

  • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]17•2 months ago

    How does a post/comment get associated with a region? Is it a text based analysis of the post that picks out keywords?

    When you click on a region, and depending on the regionscope (country, province, contintent, etc.) the string is passed to the lemmy-client-js search function (e.g. west asia, egypt, california). The posts/comments that pop up are just the search results on the string. At the very bottom of the lemmy integration you find the link to the search page and how the query works. I'm afraid it's just a fancy search page that is leveraging all fields you see here https://hexbear.net/search :)

    Another thought, would it be feasible to show a timeline view to show which regions are "hot" at the moment and over time? I imagine in 2022 that Ukraine would light up (no pun intended), and in 2024 so would Gaza. That would be kind of cool to see.

    That's a great Idea! Not sure how to be able to implement it. Lemmy-client-js would probably need to be able to take fromDate and toDate as a parameter on the search function if I understand your idea correctly.

    • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]14•2 months ago

      Ahh, ok, now I understand, it's like a frontend for the search page where the map is your search input. Makes total sense now. And also probably means that what I suggested can't be reasonably done like this. Probably works better taking an offline data dump and running some big data analysis over all the posts.