As a relatively new ham, one of the activities I’ve gravitated towards has been POTA, since it’s really accessible, and the pota.app site successfully “gamifies” it a bit, and helps with coordination with a pretty simple interface.
I’ve also seen some people doing a bit more with social media on POTA (and presumably other *OTA’s). For example, some folks post pictures of activations and/or livestream some of their activities. It’s pretty fun, and they seem to generate a lot of engagement/excitement.
It struck me that it would be nice not to have to log into e.g. Facebook (ick) to access that kind of content, but I haven’t been able to find any Fediverse alternatives for that sort of a thing.
Thus the questions:
- Is anyone aware of any existing efforts to develop general purpose spotting/OTA-alike implementation(s) using the Fediverse?
- It seems like Lemmy or Mastodon could almost support this already, perhaps with some custom filtering/CSS to hide QRT’s etc, and maybe a browser extension or script to support cross spotting on pota.app or other relevant sites (WWFF, SOTA, etc.)
Curious to know what others think. Perhaps try creating a “spots” community here to test the waters?
A dedicated federated service was my first idea - I’ve been meaning to play around with Fedify for that reason. On the other hand it’s not really my area of expertise, and I didn’t want to be that guy who drops in to be like “can somebody build this software I want?” Lol.
Would totally try to contribute though.
I’d start with a mastodon hashtag and just manually spot. If it gets popular, you can connect a bot account that gets data from wherever you want.
An alternative is to publish an RSS feed for your station.