Show HN: Geofenced chat communities anyone can create

Show HN: Geofenced chat communities anyone can create(vicinity.social)

57 points by clarencehoward 190 days ago | 61 comments

Hi HN, I built a location-based chatroom with Discord-like servers. This started as a portfolio project to learn WebSockets but has spiraled into something else entirely.

There are two features right now:

Drop - Single chatrooms that can only be seen within a specified radius and only last for a time less than 48 hours chosen by the user.

Hubs - Geofenced servers modeled after Discord. These are not time restricted. They can be created by anyone and the creator becomes the admin able to add channels and set rules. When a user enters the location’s area, they can join the hub and continue seeing messages even after leaving. Hubs cannot overlap, so once one exists in an area another cannot be created on it. The hub will persist as long as it is being actively used. If unused for two weeks, it will be deleted. (Still implementing this deletion aspect, so that is not in the landing page at the moment)

Why I built this.

I do not like the feel of most social media anymore, but I really like my university’s discord server. I wanted something more general that provided similar interactions. So I thought something that might work is a more general social app tied to location.

I think if it is done right it can recreate the atmosphere that I liked. I thought a lot about what that atmosphere is. I think for social media to feel natural it needs a “third thing”: a shared interest or object that creates a connection between two people, or a neutral ground for communication.

Having something in common just makes the interactions better and more useful. I think location can serve as general thing in common, especially if the servers are curated by locals. It could also be a good way for people to immediately connect in a new place.

Right now, I’m just having fun building this thing. I would honestly like to use it if other people were on there… and it was built better and an app.

Feedback

I’m looking for any feedback. What’s a good idea or what’s a bad idea. This is really just a prototype, so there are some rough edges, and I am actively working on it. If you find any bugs and feel like communicating them, please do. You can reach me at nhowar@uwo.ca

stavros 190 days ago |

I was interested in trying this, but the UI is like pulling teeth. I couldn't accept the ToS because the checkbox was under the terms box, and had to tap very carefully.

Then I tried to create a Hub, but couldn't figure out how to get it to accept my drawing (there's no "done" button, only "cancel", even though the polygon I want is right there). After a few frustrating tries, I went back and noticed that I need to click the first point again, which is very unintuitive.

After that, it kept complaining that my area is too big, and there was no way to live-adjust the area while seeing how big it is. I had to cancel out of the whole thing, go out to the hub screen, then click "start drawing" again for another try. I didn't make it past that.

clarencehoward 189 days ago | |

Thanks for the feedback! I increased the max size from 125 hectares to 5000 hectares. I had some debate about what would be a good max size, not so large that it takes up a whole city, but also not so small that few people can join it. For some reason which I can no longer remember I landed on 125 hectares.

It is probably too small, but for now I just want to make it easy to use. At the default zoom level 125 hectares is tiny and I am not surprised it was hard to make something small enough. I just got so used to the way it worked when I was testing I would immediately zoom in without noticing.

It will not save your hub unless you're logged in. The logic was that since someone needed to be an admin, they needed to be logged in. I should probably find a work around for that for now while I am just trying to get people to test it out. No one wants to give their email to some random site.

I am going to work on making the hub drawing more intuitive. It should really have a done button.

Thanks for giving it a try.

stavros 189 days ago | | |

Yep, these decisions are perfectly understandable, it's just that I need to know what's happening and why I can't do certain things. Drawing blindly only to be told that your area is 126 hectares, for example, is frustrating.

It's good that you increased the area for now, because there's no way that I find anyone on there in what's basically the size of a neighbourhood. Maybe you could reduce it if it gets more popular?

edent 190 days ago |

I've been looking for something like this for a while![1]

How do you deal with spam?

For example, Telegram has a "people near me" option which is full of drugs and sex-workers. Great if you like that sort of thing, but not exactly welcoming if you just want to chat to other people in the park / conference / stadium etc.

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/07/why-is-it-so-hard-to-chat-t...

emilburzo 189 days ago | |

For anyone else trying to find the Telegram feature:

> Telegram Announces Removal of "People Nearby" Feature

emilburzo 190 days ago |

Back in the day when Direct Connect[1] was a thing, and we all had insane speeds in the metropolitan area (but not so great outside of that), I used to run a DC hub. Which due to said speeds had mostly people that were close by, geographically speaking, and the interactions felt so much more relevant, probably because of the "third thing" you mention, the common interest/background.

So I've also been thinking for a while now: how can that style of community be recreated? There's of course the chicken-and-egg problem until you have traction, but also things like: how big should the community be, geographically? The same size in the US vs EU likely encompasses quite different amounts of people. Should it be anonymous or real identities? Should history be viewable by new members or should it be ephemeral? And so on.

Anyway, interesting prototype, I hope you get some traction!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

pogue 190 days ago |

This was the model YikYak used and it was so much fun. They very much promoted it for use at colleges for students, but ended up geofence blocking it around high schools/middle schools because of cyberbulling concerns.

But, if enough people used it around certain areas, it could be a lot of fun & very helpful just to chit chat & talk about the weather & etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak

EDIT I can't accept the terms on my Samsung phone, as the text is over top of the buttons and I can't do anything but scroll the terms. Not sure if this is a browser (Brave) problem or a font size or what.

https://imgur.com/a/LjFFLn5

just-tom 190 days ago | |

This happened to me too - the solution is to temporarily set the page view as desktop view through the browser settings.

themanofpow 190 days ago |

The concept reminds me of YikYak which amassed a large user base and was successful. But you should also take a look at why YikYak failed in the end.

deaux 190 days ago | |

The solution here is human moderation and accepting that it's not going to turn into a unicorn, but a sustainable medium-sized business is incredibly possible. There are existing examples of this.

dangus 190 days ago | | |

Which examples? I can’t think of any profitable companies with a profile like that. Free social media sites basically require scale.

Human moderation is going to be a huge hurdle for this. Connecting Internet users by location seems like a massive safety liability.

Making sure users are human and not just gathering locations of uses at an individual non-aggregated level also seems like a horrendous bad time.

On top of that, anonymous mode is going to be removed in the future, so you literally just have to tell other users your seemingly somewhat precise location, tied to your real persona.

Who wants this?

It’s also crazy that this site asks for location before even telling us what it is. On mobile it’s especially bad because the site isn’t even loaded or visible before the OS prompt covers basically the whole screen.

The service does need your location on the marketing page, collect that when users actually start using it.

b_e_n_t_o_n 190 days ago | | |

Not AI moderation? I'd assume the more scalable option is having an LLM parse messages when reported.

antiloper 190 days ago |

What techniques do you use to prevent users from using GPS spoofing to join distant chats?

b_e_n_t_o_n 190 days ago |

This is really great, the only problem for me is that there is nobody around me! I can see it working way better for stuff like universities though.

I wonder if there could be a variant for Drop which is world wide - imagine being able to join a chat in a foreign country (hopefully you speak the language!) and chat with the locals. I imagine moderation would be a big pain but I could see it being fun and sort of in the spirit of the old web.

myself248 189 days ago | |

Right, there's an onboarding/bootstrapping problem where the first users in an area have nobody to talk to. The default radius should scale by user density, perhaps.

BergAndCo 189 days ago |

I've noticed so many bot accounts are angry at any website whose purpose is to quarantine Indian spammers, but if a single one of them had actually tried the website they would have commented "Hey you have the baseUrl wrong, the ToS "Accept" button makes a request to http://localhost:3008/signup and http://localhost:3008/api/auth/anonymous"

BergAndCo 189 days ago | |

I "hacked" my way in but seem to be the only drop/hub in the entire server. My feedback:

- The error message that anon users can't create hubs should happen when they click "Create", not after they go through the creation process

- 125 hectares is ridiculously small. Even in densely-populated areas, it takes 2500 hectares encompasses a neighborhood

- The chat window doesn't maximize, it's just a sidebar, and there's no emojis or GIFs or image embeds or links or markdown/richtext support or ability to edit/delete messages

- It would be cool if there was a bottom bar with a "global chat" / event log where you see people creating new hubs/drops

clarencehoward 189 days ago |

You should be able to accept the TOS on mobile now - although if your screen is really small it may be hard to actually read it, still working on that. Honestly I'm pretty embarrassed that I missed that. The TOS was the last thing I added late last night before making the post and I didn't check how it worked on mobile.

Thanks for all the feedback so far! It has been very helpful.

clarencehoward 189 days ago | |

Well, now I'm even more embarrassed. I left some local variables in when I pushed the fix this morning and the site was blocked CORS for about an hour. This is why you don't push to prod when you're in a rush and half asleep. Thanks for letting me know.

geooff_ 190 days ago |

After failing to create a hub (too large in my cade) the state of hub selection isn't reset (you need to cancel manually before retrying)

Zee2 190 days ago |

This is super cool, and exactly what I’d want! Although I just tried creating a Drop (twice) and it didn’t seem to work.

zby 190 days ago |

Great idea!

I have been thinking about similar systems: https://web.archive.org/web/20061014073443/http://zby.aster....

nekitamo 190 days ago |

I can't accept the ToS on mobile

dummyvariable 190 days ago | |

Same here on desktop

olalonde 190 days ago | | |

Same here (MacBook Air). I assume the developer uses a large screen.

rurban 190 days ago | | |

I could on Firefox mobile

cellis 190 days ago |

On chrome iOS I’m physically unable to press the three checkboxes on the terms which means I can’t try your app. They appear to be overlapped by the terms themselves and thus never received click events.

madaxe_again 190 days ago | |

Yeah, this only appears to work on desktops with a res of 4K or greater, which is… not ideal for a social network?

gricardo99 190 days ago | |

iOS safari same issue. can’t get passed the terms

pixel_popping 189 days ago |

If I may... focus on improving the UI, this is the exact same "template" we are seeing across thousand of SaaS and it lowers credibility instantly.

LANcaster 189 days ago |

"Failed to fetch" error, when trying to sign up.

rishikeshs 189 days ago |

Hi! I wanted to try this and had a hard time accepting the checkboxes in the terms popup on safari. It works in Chrome but safari I cannot.

cat-whisperer 190 days ago |

I am not expert, but we should definitely have a SSH based chat experience in 2025. Everything is moving to terminal, this should too!

bluerooibos 190 days ago |

Cool! On Chrome Desktop, I'm unable to sign up due to not being able to click the top T&C checkbox (overlapping content).

rickcarlino 189 days ago |

The terms of service modal is broken on iOS Firefox. The checkbox is not clickable. I was not able to try it out as a result.

sovietmudkipz 190 days ago |

I created an app using a similar concept as a hackathon project, in meteorJS. It was fun! We won 2nd place.

jonplackett 190 days ago |

I can’t accept the ts and cs. They’re just greyed out.

dangus 190 days ago |

The whole thing is a bad idea.

You’re looking to replicate a college campus experience but for the general public. That’s your first yellow flag so to speak.

The problem is that adults don’t live on college campuses and don’t really have the same socialization patterns. They’re not in a “safe” bubble where everyone they encounter has the commonality of attending the same admission-required school, where they have a baseline level of trust for random people like a college student has for the other people in their bubble. College students can get physically kicked off of campus for doing things against school policy that aren’t even at the level of being illegal. In real life I can be living next to a convicted sex offender and there’s nothing I can do about it besides move.

Your competitor is Facebook Groups, which is an absolute elephant in the space.

Your implementation so far feels creepy. You’re asking for location immediately on the marketing page (why?).

The marketing page seems to indicate that users are just going to disclose their exact current location and not be anonymous after the beta. The screenshots look like I’m going to reveal my location to strangers as a dot on a map. I don’t know if you’re really disclosing your users’ exact locations to each other or if they’re made more generalized but that seems like an immediate no thanks for just about anyone with any reasonable sense of threat evaluation.

I don’t mean this in a discriminatory way, but your founder profile seems to be “two nerdy male college students.”

Can I ask you: do you think women would want to disclose their semi-precise location to strangers on the Internet? What’s the male to female ratio on this campus discord server you’re looking to capture the vibe from?

You also say this experience is trying to replicate the close community you have on discord. Why am I not just using discord? Spoiler alert: I’m already using discord with local people in my area.

Amazing portfolio project, I’m just not vibing with it as a business idea.

p1anecrazy 190 days ago |

Please repost when you fix the accept TOS step

bragr 190 days ago |

The legal terms seem pretty evil for what this is. I'll allow that evil may not be the intent. Perhaps you just asked a lawyer for the most bulletproof terms possible, but what you've end up with is a very one sided set of terms. Honestly the more I read, the weirder they get. If I tell a lie to another user, them I'm liable to be banned? I see what you are going for in that section, but as written, any normal, day to day, social lubricant style lie/falsehood could get you banned? On a social network?

Edit: reading further, I suspect these were just taken from somewhere unless in 2025 they've got some Flash code to protect:

>Copy or adapt the Services' software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.