places.pub
places.pub is an early-stage, experimental API that provides place objects compatible with ActivityPub protocols to enrich posts with location information or announce geosocial activities such as “arrived” (in other words, checking in), leaving, or travelling between places.
Evan Prodromou, who built the API:
One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.
The API serves two functions: it enables social-networking applications to find locations and access places via unique URLs. It’s a surprisingly small application that runs on OpenStreetMap data hosted on Google Cloud Public Datasets.
Again, Evan Prodromou:
Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function.
So, who’s going to build an ActivityPub-compatible Swarm clone?