Just thought I'd share something I've been working on. Basically it's a message relay that sends messages to others around you (given GPS coordinates from browser). Can choose range from "Range" pull down near top left (hover over options for approximate distances). Back end is written in Rust.
Coincidentally, years ago I had an idea for an app like this and I was going to call it "Bonfire". Aside from an inquiry with the owners of the bonfire.com domain name as to their interest in selling, I never went anywhere with the idea.
With the advent of wifi on airplanes, I made a similar thing called "flight roulette". Inspiration was from chat roulette except instead of matching you to people randomly it would you to people directly below you on the ground as you flew over.
This is fun. In europe we have jodel which has a big userbase. The quality of discussion varies from location and it's fun to listen in what the locals are talking about.
I also got a geolocation error even though I allowed location access. Could benefit from allowing the user to set a location as a fallback (or override). FF 72 (Ubuntu)
And also for "goddamn geoIP database thinks I'm Canadian even though I'm in the US" reasons.
True story, that one. Threw wrenches in a bunch of random things, like Newegg and Spotify. Apparently I wasn't the only one in my town with that issue.
This is a really cool idea, and I like it so far!! -- would you mind sharing what the different ranges are for each type? I see people chatting, but not sure how close they are to me... Within 10 miles radius? 100?
Edit: I'm on mobile, it seems like maybe it shows on desktop. I'd check but I'm laying in bed haha. Regardless, I really like this idea. Seems like a good way to maybe even meet my neighbors since I moved across the country recently
This is cool! I had been thinking about creating something similar but I couldn't solve this problem:
Given a radius of 5 miles and three users in a geographic straight line, each 4 miles from each other. User 1 and user 2 are in the same radius, user 2 and three are in the same radius but user 1 and 3 are not in the same radius. Therefor user 1 and 3 will only see "half" the conversation (which would obviously be confusing). Do you solve for this problem? if so, how?
An idea of how to solve that problem: connect a user to the closest person if there is nobody in their radius. Use Disjoint Sets to sort of glom people together like pieces of cereal in milk. Everybody in the same glob can hear each other.
You could divide the country into segments, and a person gets to talk to everyone in their segment.
Obviously, you'd want smaller segments in areas with a high user density, and larger segments in areas with low user density.
You could generate segments with something like EM clustering. You probably wouldn't want continuous segment recalculation, or two people could be split mid-conversation when neither of them had moved.
I think the concept is neat, and this could be a worthwhile mode for some chat apps. I would get rid of the cute range names though and just tell users how many km this reaches.
I remember there was a project exactly like this in nReduce (a communal online incubator which sadly died quickly), a few years back.
I have experience with VHF radio emulation, so I wanted to ask what formula you're using for ranging?
I've found the haversine formula to be a robust compromise between accuracy and computational complexity, where on a typical day, I'm doing 5000-200000 haversine calculations a second.
This reminds me of the Twinkle iOS app by Tapulous. It worked a lot like Twitter, except you only saw posts from within a certain radius. There's now an unrelated dating app of the same name; I can only find this about the original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE
For a second I got this confused with Firechat (but I guess that's a different setup since proximity is required for direct p2p relay, not just to find people to chat with).
Had a similar iOS app years ago that would make chat groups with everyone in a 1km radius [1]. In the end our largest hurdle was getting enough users together per location.
Thanks. I made something similar a while ago myself called Shoutium, basically the same thing. More simpler this time around tho. Users are always difficult to get, this too will probably also fizzle out.
All the best of luck with Shoutium! I still love the concept of a local messaging app and it was great fun in active areas. But like you said getting the critical mass required is always tough.
It's very easy to impersonate another user right now by just using the same name. It would be great if the first 5 chars of a hashed IP fingerprint (or something similar) could be shown next to the name as a kind of ID to prevent that kinda thing from happening.
You might want to make 'message-text' have relative positioning, and 'range-display' absolutely positioned so 'ignition' or 'bonfire' isn't hovering over the text box.
I understand that it's a work in progress, but I could see a polished, native mobile version of this really taking off. I'd be excited to try it, at least.
Location based chatting is a privacy nightmare. How do you protect against stalkers using this tool for triangulating the actual physical location of someone?
If the GPS coordinatates are client-generated, then it would be possible to spoof the coordinates and generate a search pattern rather quickly.
Competition like grindr and badoo try to randomize the distances.
