I'm trying my hand at organizing mapping events. In fact I'm doing one tomorrow by coincidence. The first few, I agonized over making sure everything was prepared, I have an agenda for how I think things will go.
It's pointless. People are doing their own thing. One guy came with a phone without an Internet connection so we couldn't even edit the same area without saving over each other. He had to upload later and deal with the conflicts.
At least, it's pointless for me. I guess I need a firmer hand or something. Or maybe it's because I'm not in a heavy population center (it's questionable that I could even start an OSM community here) and I'm at the mercy of whoever I can even get to show up. In Delhi I'm sure it's different.
At this point I'm just going to aim for regular events, minimal planning on my part, less stress and more energy for more events. We'll figure it out as we go, as we end up doing anyway. Tomorrow is my first event with that approach, we'll see how it goes. I only have two other people showing up, so it should be simple.
Hey, author here. I guess this is something I should update the post to address.
I guess I have always been in the "agonizing over every detail" stage, and remain so today (looks like we both have mapping parties tomorrow, because tomorrow's our 7th party :) ).
In the beginning, we were much more "lax". We waited for latecomers. During the survey, we moved in one big group. We focused on the social aspect of the meetup - often, the meet-and-greet phase would go on for too long, and there wouldn't be much time spent in actual mapping. After each party, I would be disappointed to note that most people did not make significant map changes during the survey.
In the 5th party, we decided to observe a stricter schedule, and tried a new approach - that of splitting up into teams, assigning an area to each team, surveying the assigned areas, then regrouping and reviewing the contributions. There was a radical difference. Everyone was contributing. A significant amount of data was gathered, and the social aspect of the meetup didn't seem to suffer as we feared it might.
Delhi is very populous, but somehow there are very few OSM contributors here. [1] It's been a real struggle to get people interested in OSM, and even more of a struggle to keep them contributing in the long term. Most participants don't continue mapping after the mapping party/workshop. I prefer to think there's something off in my approach rather than in the people, because that gives me the energy to keep trying new things.
It's great that you're organizing mapping parties in your region. I laud your initiative. Good luck for your parties!
[1] India's OSM community seems to mostly be concentrated in the southern states. For the Delhi OSM community, Bangalore remains our inspiration both for OSM coverage and for mapping party productivity.
In all communities, your gonna have churn and only a small percentage that is gonna continue contributing.
In Belgium, we've done some active community building. A chat channel helps, but regular meetups too - often these are just sitting in a bar or in a cozy place and discussing everything that is related to OpenStreetMap.
It also helps that quite a few have jobs in or at least using OpenStreetMap.
Yeah once I get to the point you're describing I will think about rules and details again. And I will keep your blog post handy. I just think I've just been optimizing prematurely. I have to get a sense of the failure modes before I start making too many rules. I end up spending energy on the wrong thing and get frustrated when it doesn't work anyway. I'm also doing something much simpler than you guys. Good lord, laser distance meters!? I'll be happy to number the houses in town and add all the restaurants and stuff for now :-)
BTW I'm also not just targeting newcomers, I'm also trying to gather a community among the existing local editors. It's just something I enjoy doing and it would be fun to do with more people.
As for the low numbers of newcomers - I could reach out more. There's a local tech scene slowly coalescing in my area. Once I have regular mapping meetups I'll be able to invite people at the wider tech meetups here with more confidence. (For existing editors, I should spend more time combing local edits, that's worked so far)
Similarly, as recommended in the article, StreetComplete[1], which shows incomplete areas on your map and marks them as quests to add to :)
Also recommended, Organic Maps[2], which is an OSM client that's good enough to use as my main map app (in my city, at least)
Final recommendation, this interview[3] with the founder of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast. 3 hours of fascinating insight into the history and future of the project, including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars
> including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars
As someone who intends to never drive again, this is very funny to me. Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport, self driving or otherwise. They take up an absurd amount of space.
Street Complete is rather good. I filled in a few details in Hong Kong (come on you lot, the population density there is huge!) recently.
Street numbering is generally quite awful on all maps. Google has made a right old hash of much of my town. It manages to put a hairdresser in the middle of the road on the exit from a pretty large roundabout and a taxi company on a small C17th Methodist cemetery.
The entrance to my own company as shown by Google would involve a multi car pile up thanks to the massive "intelligence" that can't manage multiple requests for a change from someone who is listed at Company House, who uses a 20+ year old Google account with the same name and a company email address with the same, quite uncommon surname, in it. I have tried multiple ways to address getting Google to correct their fucking map. I've even tried simulating their own instructions in my correction attempts.
Go on try it yourself - which little UK company am I MD of? Go and find it and put street view on to see why driving through a railing, pavement and a 20' retaining wall is a bad idea. No, it isn't hard for humans to figure out but it is hard for the clever kiddies at Google to get their algorithms let me fix their fucking map to find the actual entrance and the route to it.
In the UK a postcode can cover something up to 100 properties, as required. My business is in a fairly odd stub of land and has its own postcode. The other property adjacent, within the same plot also has its own postcode.
A fairly large dose of irony is that I do occasionally do reviews for Google and am apparently a guide or some such nonsense and my reviews have 1000's of views. My reviews are treated as gold (and might help or hinder a business) but my attempts to fix a real issue with my own company address is ignored.
Just fixing up street numbering will make a huge difference to navigation but Street Complete covers much, much more. I've also done my best with the paths in my local [edit: sp] park, to describe accessibility and "cyclability" etc.
Funny, I find OSM most useful for all the little walking paths people plot... Way better than Google maps. No car based system will ever be good there.
I looked at a few network requests and you are fetching the country code for some locations, is there some docu on this how/why you are doing so? I soon perhaps also have to implement a simple "is this location in country XY" check and it seems both trivial and complex at the same time to solve, without a full map-aware database/system.
Yeah, the country location is a requirement to show the opening hours. The library (https://github.com/opening-hours/opening_hours.js) is aware of holidays in many countries, but for that it needs to know what country a POI is in.
The idea: I've taken all the country boundaries from OSM (via nominatim); I slice them in four parts. If the resulting geojson is too big, I slice this again until I have small geojsons, suitable to download. If you know the zoomlevel and location, one can use the standard slippy-tile-index to fetch the correct tile. (Alternatively, if the entire tile is within a country, it'll just return the country code)
However, the client also needs to know what zoomlevel there is. For that, I built a search tree.
It's been a while though, so I've forgotten some of the details ;)
OpenStreetMap is great and I only wish more people using apps like Strava, RideWithGPS, Komoot or OSMAnd realized that they can contribute, benefitting everybody else using those apps.
In Toronto I only see a very small number of people contributing to OSM's cycling infrastructure, which results in the map not as up-to-date, which in turn means that the aforementioned apps will not propose routes through the nicest, most recently built bicycle tracks we have in the city. The situation is not terrible by any means, but it could be better.
If i'm using ridewithgps, how do I contribute? is there an easy tool, or maybe it's something these tools could integrate? I know I ride trails thatdon't always show up on OSM views.
The website has satellite images overlayed wirh map data, so it's easy to see what you are doing.
You can look at your pictures to remind yourself of what was missing.
If you have recorded your ride,you can also upload your GPX trace to OpenStreetMap to make it easier to trace features that don't show up clearly on satellite images.
Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Look around and start small. Good luck!
This is a great effort. People just doing something good for the community. No expectation of reward or seeking rent on the output. Just doing the right thing.
Compare with Google who use their monopoly position to keep amassing data which they keep for themselves. Imagine all the effort that's gone into working for Google for free that could have been put into OSM. If you work on tools for allowing people to do that you should be ashamed.
On a different note it's funny to think back to the start of OSM. It was created in the UK because all the data from our beloved national mapping department, all paid for by us, the public, of course, was not available for use in any way by emerging digital technology like GPS etc. After waiting for too long people decided we'll just build our own. Now we have one of the richest datasets in existence and it's free. There's still a ton of stuff locked up in Ordnance Survey, though, and can't be released because reasons.
It's also fun to think how much fun OSM was back then. We were literally walking round neighbourhoods collecting GPS data in completely blank parts of the map. Satellite imagery came later but can't help thinking it's a way things becoming "better" made them less fun.
I'm mostly an "armchair mapper", but I actually find adding details from satellite imagery to be really fun. It's kind of like a nerdy version of paint-by-number.
I wouldn't call Ordinance Survey beloved. Their leisure maps have been a rotting liability for the last decade at least. Totally untrustworthy for hikers/walkers.
I only discovered OSM after getting shafted on a public footpath which was completely destroyed and had been for years with a river running through it and a mud bank.
I really enjoyed this! I've only tried to do this once and it was a bit of a failure (nobody showed up on the day despite a lot of interest), but since then I've done a lot of organizing in other fields (political stuff mostly) and have a lot more experience planning events. The mix of general organizing principals (call people, they're way more likely to show up) and OSM specific stuff in this article (don't map eg. a mall, it's more confusing for newbies) was really helpful and I think there are a lot of tips for organizing other kinds of things; everything from lan parties to mutual aid could benefit from this. Thank you OP!
Hi, great article. I'm pretty new to OSM. One of my hobbies is 3D scanning for photogrammetry. Is there a good way to contribute 3d models (retopologized ofc) to OSM in some way? Could include drone scans or buildings, sculptures, etc.
I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to.
Also:
> It's easy to pick a proprietary network like Telegram or an unsustainable one like Matrix,
What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running, and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram messages without opening instagram, etc.
Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org or something). We were going to deploy our own identity server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's all handled from there.
It's not less sustainable than most other FOSS projects, it's just that most other FOSS projects also don't have sustainable funding. If you're just comparing the actual implementations this is true of most XMPP stuff as well.
However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable.
Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community.
(P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)
> I'm really curious how this person got codeberg pages working, I still haven't managed to get a codeberg page deployed. I thought it required a 3rd party server, like their actions seem to.
Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/
> What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP.
It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.
Hosting costs makes sense (though last check ours only really pegs out at 4gb, granted that's with about 100 logins).
So far as I can tell, xmpp has no concept of threading, is that the case? It's what prevented me from choosing it when I went with matrix for my co-op.
Matrix.org (and Element) is running out of money and hosts a large number of free users. The rest of the community probably won't be able to handle the influx of users the day the Matrix.org homeserver needs to close.
That's the usecase of Matrix As IRC I guess you mean? I've never participated in any matrix.org rooms outside of the matrix / synapse / element support rooms (I believe they're on matrix.org). For our community it's kind of moot if matrix.org closes, the only downside is of course support will drop off precipitously. But other than that, we self host.
> Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't check my messages/email".
Maybe it’s different in India but here in the states, when you tell most people that you’re not coordinating with imessage/sms (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you’ll get blank stares. I’m reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png
Author here, and it's quite similar in India. Everyone expects me to WhatsApp them the details, and the ubiquity of proprietary platforms is infuriating. Thankfully we've been able to use cell calls and SMS/email until we can onboard them to XMPP. (Many of us in the Delhi OSM community are free software and XMPP advocates.)
Matrix only recently started adopting an (as of now) experimental protocol that allows purging older parts of the append-only data set that constitutes a channel.
Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).
If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.
Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.
> if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.
If you want to make the time to take photos and take notes, and sit down later and enter them on your computer, go for it. Likely that's a faster way to do a larger entry. In particular, I haven't seen a mobile app that does a great job of polygon geometry editing — a mouse really helps.
But I don't think it's a problem to do simple POI entry or attribute updates from a simpler mobile app like "Go Mapp!!". I think like many things, the best mapping tool is "the one that you have with you".
To add to this, not everyone needs to pursue the same kind of work. As a more experienced mapper I make a point of allocating my time toward what I think of as “scaffolding” tasks that enable others’ mobile contributions—geometry, wide area edits, alignment, navigational references, model clarification, or anything that might trigger new quests in StreetComplete or declutter formidable ones. It’s gratifying to have exposed new opportunities for mobile contributions and see the questers begin filling them in.
What do you recommend to beginners for mapping in the field? Walk around with a laptop? Or just notes on paper for later data entry?
In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives.
(For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)
The easiest thing people can do these days is to take georeferenced photographs with their phones, best with a photo app that will record the direction the phone was pointing, for example OpenCamera on Android. Then take their time and then add the information either with iD (the javascript based editor on openstreetmap.org) on a desktop (or JOSM if they are savy enough), or on either of the mobile editors, but most importantly sitting down in peace and quiet.
While direct entry (on the phone) is what I would do and would recommend for anybody that already knows the ropes, it is going to be overwhelming for a beginner.
PS: I was commenting on the whole thread, and if you look through it you will see Steve mentioned as the OSM savant.
> point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing
I wouldn't have made most of my contributions (or even started mapping) if I had to use their website on a tiny screen or had to take pictures or notes to add it later when I had my computer. I use their website, but that only for more advanced stuff.
The right approach is approach is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Teach new users about the website, but also about apps that let you quickly fix/update/add new stuff right on your phone.
You don't have to do this yourself, just understand that simple apps are a good way to bring new users in, that they're good enough for a lot of tasks, and that this newer generation of tech users usually prefer apps to web editors.
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It's pointless. People are doing their own thing. One guy came with a phone without an Internet connection so we couldn't even edit the same area without saving over each other. He had to upload later and deal with the conflicts.
At least, it's pointless for me. I guess I need a firmer hand or something. Or maybe it's because I'm not in a heavy population center (it's questionable that I could even start an OSM community here) and I'm at the mercy of whoever I can even get to show up. In Delhi I'm sure it's different.
At this point I'm just going to aim for regular events, minimal planning on my part, less stress and more energy for more events. We'll figure it out as we go, as we end up doing anyway. Tomorrow is my first event with that approach, we'll see how it goes. I only have two other people showing up, so it should be simple.
I guess I have always been in the "agonizing over every detail" stage, and remain so today (looks like we both have mapping parties tomorrow, because tomorrow's our 7th party :) ).
In the beginning, we were much more "lax". We waited for latecomers. During the survey, we moved in one big group. We focused on the social aspect of the meetup - often, the meet-and-greet phase would go on for too long, and there wouldn't be much time spent in actual mapping. After each party, I would be disappointed to note that most people did not make significant map changes during the survey.
In the 5th party, we decided to observe a stricter schedule, and tried a new approach - that of splitting up into teams, assigning an area to each team, surveying the assigned areas, then regrouping and reviewing the contributions. There was a radical difference. Everyone was contributing. A significant amount of data was gathered, and the social aspect of the meetup didn't seem to suffer as we feared it might.
Delhi is very populous, but somehow there are very few OSM contributors here. [1] It's been a real struggle to get people interested in OSM, and even more of a struggle to keep them contributing in the long term. Most participants don't continue mapping after the mapping party/workshop. I prefer to think there's something off in my approach rather than in the people, because that gives me the energy to keep trying new things.
It's great that you're organizing mapping parties in your region. I laud your initiative. Good luck for your parties!
[1] India's OSM community seems to mostly be concentrated in the southern states. For the Delhi OSM community, Bangalore remains our inspiration both for OSM coverage and for mapping party productivity.
In Belgium, we've done some active community building. A chat channel helps, but regular meetups too - often these are just sitting in a bar or in a cozy place and discussing everything that is related to OpenStreetMap.
It also helps that quite a few have jobs in or at least using OpenStreetMap.
BTW I'm also not just targeting newcomers, I'm also trying to gather a community among the existing local editors. It's just something I enjoy doing and it would be fun to do with more people.
As for the low numbers of newcomers - I could reach out more. There's a local tech scene slowly coalescing in my area. Once I have regular mapping meetups I'll be able to invite people at the wider tech meetups here with more confidence. (For existing editors, I should spend more time combing local edits, that's worked so far)
Also recommended, Organic Maps[2], which is an OSM client that's good enough to use as my main map app (in my city, at least)
Final recommendation, this interview[3] with the founder of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast. 3 hours of fascinating insight into the history and future of the project, including how he doesn't think OSM will be relevant for much longer once someone manages to develop a mapping project into their self-driving cars
[1] https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en [2] https://organicmaps.app/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB9NxbnE1i0
As someone who intends to never drive again, this is very funny to me. Cars are very obviously not the future of human transport, self driving or otherwise. They take up an absurd amount of space.
Street numbering is generally quite awful on all maps. Google has made a right old hash of much of my town. It manages to put a hairdresser in the middle of the road on the exit from a pretty large roundabout and a taxi company on a small C17th Methodist cemetery.
The entrance to my own company as shown by Google would involve a multi car pile up thanks to the massive "intelligence" that can't manage multiple requests for a change from someone who is listed at Company House, who uses a 20+ year old Google account with the same name and a company email address with the same, quite uncommon surname, in it. I have tried multiple ways to address getting Google to correct their fucking map. I've even tried simulating their own instructions in my correction attempts.
Go on try it yourself - which little UK company am I MD of? Go and find it and put street view on to see why driving through a railing, pavement and a 20' retaining wall is a bad idea. No, it isn't hard for humans to figure out but it is hard for the clever kiddies at Google to get their algorithms let me fix their fucking map to find the actual entrance and the route to it.
In the UK a postcode can cover something up to 100 properties, as required. My business is in a fairly odd stub of land and has its own postcode. The other property adjacent, within the same plot also has its own postcode.
A fairly large dose of irony is that I do occasionally do reviews for Google and am apparently a guide or some such nonsense and my reviews have 1000's of views. My reviews are treated as gold (and might help or hinder a business) but my attempts to fix a real issue with my own company address is ignored.
Just fixing up street numbering will make a huge difference to navigation but Street Complete covers much, much more. I've also done my best with the paths in my local [edit: sp] park, to describe accessibility and "cyclability" etc.
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https://github.com/pietervdvn/MapComplete-data/tree/main/lat...
The country awareness source code is here: https://github.com/pietervdvn/latlon2country
The idea: I've taken all the country boundaries from OSM (via nominatim); I slice them in four parts. If the resulting geojson is too big, I slice this again until I have small geojsons, suitable to download. If you know the zoomlevel and location, one can use the standard slippy-tile-index to fetch the correct tile. (Alternatively, if the entire tile is within a country, it'll just return the country code)
However, the client also needs to know what zoomlevel there is. For that, I built a search tree.
It's been a while though, so I've forgotten some of the details ;)
Even for someone who just want a quick feature look up it seems pretty useful.
Search has two "magnifying glass" buttons, and could probably use a suggestion popup.
A nice showcase of Svelte too, the thing is refreshingly light and fast.
And I spent quite some time getting it somewhat fast - not to mention that my caching server is currently down.
In Toronto I only see a very small number of people contributing to OSM's cycling infrastructure, which results in the map not as up-to-date, which in turn means that the aforementioned apps will not propose routes through the nicest, most recently built bicycle tracks we have in the city. The situation is not terrible by any means, but it could be better.
1. When you see a trail or any other feature that doesn't appear on the map, take a picture.
2. When you get home, visit https://www.openstreetmap.org and start drawing.
The website has satellite images overlayed wirh map data, so it's easy to see what you are doing.
You can look at your pictures to remind yourself of what was missing.
If you have recorded your ride,you can also upload your GPX trace to OpenStreetMap to make it easier to trace features that don't show up clearly on satellite images.
Don't be afraid of making mistakes. Look around and start small. Good luck!
Compare with Google who use their monopoly position to keep amassing data which they keep for themselves. Imagine all the effort that's gone into working for Google for free that could have been put into OSM. If you work on tools for allowing people to do that you should be ashamed.
On a different note it's funny to think back to the start of OSM. It was created in the UK because all the data from our beloved national mapping department, all paid for by us, the public, of course, was not available for use in any way by emerging digital technology like GPS etc. After waiting for too long people decided we'll just build our own. Now we have one of the richest datasets in existence and it's free. There's still a ton of stuff locked up in Ordnance Survey, though, and can't be released because reasons.
It's also fun to think how much fun OSM was back then. We were literally walking round neighbourhoods collecting GPS data in completely blank parts of the map. Satellite imagery came later but can't help thinking it's a way things becoming "better" made them less fun.
I only discovered OSM after getting shafted on a public footpath which was completely destroyed and had been for years with a river running through it and a mud bank.
It deserves all the praises it gets.
Thanks for reading, and ask me anything!
PS - I suspect some may have missed my footnotes if they were reading on mobile - tap the numbers to see them.
The 3D Model Repository sounds like what you want. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/3D_Model_Repository
Wikimedia Commons might work for this, too. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons#3D_mod...
Tangentially, if you aren't already aware of them, you may be interested in OpenDroneMap (ODM) https://opendronemap.org/
and OpenAerialMap (OAM) https://openaerialmap.org/
Also:
> It's easy to pick a proprietary network like Telegram or an unsustainable one like Matrix,
What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
Matrix has been going strong for 10 years, and while it's true that the Matrix.org Foundation (and Element) need funding (c.f. https://matrix.org/blog/2024/01/2024-roadmap-and-fundraiser/ and https://matrix.org/blog/2024/04/open-source-publicly-funded-...) it's clear that elsewhere in the Matrix ecosystem there's loads of $ flying around: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automa... etc.
So I think it's a little ridiculous to call Matrix "unsustainable" (at least any more than any other FOSS project).
> I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
I'm glad, thank you for using it.
Of course! We love how easy it is to get bots up and running, and the ecosystem of bridges made it really easy to incentivize people to onboard, because we can basically offer "for free" the ability for people to answer their instagram messages without opening instagram, etc.
Our only issue has been onboarding flow. We get that there's an "identity server" but when we use vector.im and generate invite links from for example Element, they usually get sent into a flow where they, confusingly, are making an account on some big home server instead of ours (I think like matrix.org or something). We were going to deploy our own identity server after someone on iirc matrix community chat somewhere mentioned that the email flow is implemented per identity server, but all the FOSS identity servers we could find were deprecated. Anyway now we just give people tokens that we generate in synapse and screenshot instructions lol. The one thing I miss from slack is being able to just right click a Room, click "invite," enter someone's email address, and it's all handled from there.
However, that's not what's being talked about here most likely (though it's unclear since when we just say "Matrix" or "XMPP" we're talking about a protocol, not a service, client, server, etc. so who knows). If you compare Matrix the foundation/company, they are VC funded (the foundation is a bit of a sham after community pressure, it's all the same people and accounts controlling it, so it's a step in the right direction but not really well established). The moment that funding dries up, or the Element people (who still mostly control protocol work) decide they want to monetize the users more, the whole thing will fall apart. That's unsustainable.
Meanwhile proper standards organizations like the IETF or XSF have been going for way longer than 10 years and have proven track records of sustainable funding and membership. People just like to pretend it's worse somehow because they're not building sexy looking software themselves with millions in VC funding. In reality infrastructure is never sexy, and if it's using unsustainable funding models it will fail. This seems like a good reason to pick something controlled by a real standards body over something that's not if you want a long-term community.
(P.S. Since someone once accused me of bias and deliberately not mentioning this even though I'm completely open about it: I have volunteered for the XSF and have done work on both Matrix and XMPP related products and open source projects; I chose to volunteer for the XSF after working on both protocols and evaluating their funding and leadership, so take that for what it's worth)
Hi, author here. It doesn't need a 3rd party server - it's all hosted in Codeberg Git repos. Here's a guide - https://codeberg.page/
> What's unsustainable about Matrix? I've really enjoyed running our community on Matrix.
Many of us in the Delhi OpenStreetMap community are associated with projects like the Free Software Community of India, and run public instances of federated services, including Matrix and XMPP.
It has been our experience that XMPP has a dramatically lower server resource footprint than Matrix. We've actually had to close down a public Matrix service because it was economically unsustainable in this sense.
So far as I can tell, xmpp has no concept of threading, is that the case? It's what prevented me from choosing it when I went with matrix for my co-op.
> Talking over phone is the most reliable way to announce the party, send reminders and confirmations, and to coordinate during the party. That way, there's no question of "didn't check my messages/email".
Maybe it’s different in India but here in the states, when you tell most people that you’re not coordinating with imessage/sms (or fb messenger or whatsapp), you’ll get blank stares. I’m reminded of this: http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/nosql/fault-tolerance.png
Meanwhile, Matrix has never needed the full room history to be synchronised - when a server joins a room, it typically only grabs the last 20 messages (with other history pulled in demand when the client scrolls up). (It does needs to grab all the key-value state about the room, although these days that happens gradually in the background).
If you're wondering why Matrix implementations are often greedy on disk space, it's because they typically cache the key-value state aggressively (storing a snapshot of it for the room on a regular basis). However, that's just an implementation quirk; folks could absolutely come up with fancier datastructures to store it more efficiently; it's just not got to the top of anyone's todo list yet - things like performance and UX are considered much more important than disk usage right now.
Steve hasn't been a relevant force in OSM for more than a decade and if you want to do OSM a favour, point people to the editor on openstreetmap.org, not any of the mobile or "simplified" editing apps.
If you want to make the time to take photos and take notes, and sit down later and enter them on your computer, go for it. Likely that's a faster way to do a larger entry. In particular, I haven't seen a mobile app that does a great job of polygon geometry editing — a mouse really helps.
But I don't think it's a problem to do simple POI entry or attribute updates from a simpler mobile app like "Go Mapp!!". I think like many things, the best mapping tool is "the one that you have with you".
Am I missing something?
In the mapping events I’ve attended a clear goal was to onboard people into contributing casually and frequently as they go about their everyday lives.
(For context I can’t see the linked Twitter thread and have no idea why you’re talking about Steve)
While direct entry (on the phone) is what I would do and would recommend for anybody that already knows the ropes, it is going to be overwhelming for a beginner.
PS: I was commenting on the whole thread, and if you look through it you will see Steve mentioned as the OSM savant.
I wouldn't have made most of my contributions (or even started mapping) if I had to use their website on a tiny screen or had to take pictures or notes to add it later when I had my computer. I use their website, but that only for more advanced stuff.
The right approach is approach is probably somewhere between the two extremes. Teach new users about the website, but also about apps that let you quickly fix/update/add new stuff right on your phone.
You don't have to do this yourself, just understand that simple apps are a good way to bring new users in, that they're good enough for a lot of tasks, and that this newer generation of tech users usually prefer apps to web editors.
Except that the numbers show the opposite.