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/

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]
    ·
    8 months ago

    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.

    I don't see how that would affect us. If anything it would help expose the incoherent lib worldview of FUBAR instances like beehaw and dot world and only sharpen the differences between leftist instances and rightist instances. I'd recommend releasing the project under the Affero GNU Public License Version 3.0 or later (AGPL3.0+) and only advertise it to leftist instances, chuds don't give a shit.

    Most fash don't want their users to see a world map, it's all ideology to them.

    EDIT: Also if you're going to be hosting the source code on a public (not self-hosted) git forge, please choose a libre software (or at least aligned with our ideals) friendly hoster like Codeberg, notabug, source hut, GitLab etc. Please do not host this on GitHub if you can.

    • xj9 [they/them, she/her]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Afaik its also technically acceptable to make source availability contingent on having an account or filling out a form, it doesn't have to be trivially accessible.

      • hello_hello [comrade/them]
        ·
        8 months ago

        That's also correct, under the GPL and assorted copyleft licenses you're not obligated to distribute/publish the source code to anyone, only that whoever you distribute the program to is obligated to the same freedoms you have (including access to the source and publishing it themselves). The goal of a copyleft license is to promote transparency from all parties.

        I mentioned git forges since that gives way to bug/issue trackers and contributions as well as publishing the source code under a FOSS license, it would also allow the project to be branded as explicitly leftist (similar to how the lemmy devs being MLs caused a rift in the crypto-fash instances even though lemmy dot ml libbed itself to appeal to more reddit refugees, chuds wouldn't trust us).

        • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]
          ·
          8 months ago

          I'm fairly new to development and haven't done any open source yet. I asked some of the lemmy/hb devs and will make the necessary steps. I like the idea of having to have an hb account a prerequisite from @xj9@hexbear.net

          • hello_hello [comrade/them]
            ·
            8 months ago

            Good luck! All the power to you since and its really impressive that this is one of your first projects.

            A private/invite only repository seems to be the correct course of action since we already have a site like hexbear to coordinate who gets read/write access to the repo.

            • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]
              ·
              8 months ago

              I ended up making it public :)

              It's not my first project, but the first one that I ended up making open source. I've been mostly coding for fun on front-end personal projects. Software Engineering is such a big field, that all I know is that I don't know enough probably never will

    • xj9 [they/them, she/her]
      ·
      8 months ago

      i'm hosting a mirror here that i'll be using to manage my contributions to the project. i can't promise much in the way of stability at the moment, but i'll get there eventually.