Anaphory

@samfirke@a2mi.social I think it would be awesome if something like http://meutch.com and http://inventaire.io would take off! Or even better, many of such things talking to each other. Are there other, similar projects? It feels like the time is ripe, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that there are a few more getting started.

@samfirke@a2mi.social I found it interesting that you note that you

considered a decentralized, federated model but felt like the downsides outweighed the advantages Inventaire seems to be going the other direction. From https://wiki.inventaire.io/wiki/Technic#Federation_ and related discussions I gather that Inventaire was originally designed as a single instance and is slowly gaining federation features. Connections between users are apparently on hold, but it looks like data federation has been implemented since I last checked.

@samfirke@a2mi.social On the topic of my address: I have no way to judge whether my street address could be interpreted. In Inventaire, my location is a place denoting “I would be willing to go to this place to meet you for books” (traditionally a park or body of water nearby) selected and shown on OpenStreetMap, so it doesn't need to be my home address, and other users are shown on the map if they have set their location.

@samfirke@a2mi.social As someone outside the US (and having lived close to country and language borders, where I can imagine communities crossing those borders), I notice some American assumptions baked into the current version of Meutch: The interface is in English, my item description will be findable only by someone using a matching language, and the address assumes I have a state, post code, etc. Most of this can probably be fixed as needed, only finding descriptions across languages will be difficult.

@samfirke@a2mi.social The data model for things on Meutch looks very simple. There's 500 characters of description, a name, a category, pictures, and a list of comma-separated tags (with no UX to decide on helpful tags yet). If I look for something, I need to hope to hit some keywords that someone else used in their description. Inventaire inherits the data model of books (works and editions) from Wikidata – so items are interrelated and wiki-editable (which contributes to the knowledge commons).

@samfirke@a2mi.social I was recently looking for something similar to your Meutch project and found https://inventaire.io/ which is not a distributed library *of things* but just a conventional library for books. I have not managed to find a community in Inventaire and properly use it yet, so I cannot comment on how well it practially works for the community aspects, but I have some comments on things I noticed in a few minutes of exploring Meutch, in particular in comparison with Inventaire.