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:

  1. Is anyone aware of any existing efforts to develop general purpose spotting/OTA-alike implementation(s) using the Fediverse?
  2. 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?

  • BenDoubleU
    8·
    3 days ago

    I could see a community used for spotting. Not sure how the browser extension part would work.

    I see people post a sorta self-spot on mastodon all the time. Something that might be nice is a mastodon bot that could read a certain hashtag or if it was @ed so everyone could follow the bot to see who is activating.

    • 33rpm_neutron_starOPEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      Gotcha - I never really got into the microblogging format (Fediverse or not), but now that you mention it I have seen a couple of posts like you describe.

      Browser extension wouldn’t be my first (or tenth) actual choice, I’m basically spitballing for what the easiest way to get some basic filtering would be (activity, band, area, mode, QRT status etc.). You might be onto something with Mastodon bots - I remember a HRWB episode where they talked about using that mechanism for finding radio related content I think - a bot that automatically boosted posts meeting certain criteria (only vaguely recall).

      • BenDoubleU
        4·
        3 days ago

        For lemmy: it’s mostly link sharing, so I’d mostly see posting about *OTA experiences, pics, questions here in the POTA/SOTA communities.

        Mastodon, on the other hand, would just be one way to show something like that since it’s more time related and ephemeral. Bot was my first stab at something like you mean, but I do think there could be something to auto-post with all that data.

        And while not on the fediverse: I use hamspot for something like this. It flips the onus of posting a spot to actually listening FOR a spot from people you know around the fediverse.

        BUT if we want to let our ideas get REALLY wild with it: I could totally see a federated service for spotting or any *OTA related activity. Different instances handing different kinds of spots. Parks or summits or islands being different items that people can subscribe to, spot from, and activate. Just spit ballin’.

        • 33rpm_neutron_starOPEnglish
          2·
          2 days ago

          Thinking some more, Mastodon seems to support a pretty robust API:

          https://docs.joinmastodon.org/api/guidelines/

          Maybe it would be feasible to start putting together a set of standard hashtags to write a simple viewer/spotter against with the API?

          #POTA #SOTA #WWFF #SSB #CW #FT8 #OTHERMODE #20M #10M #PARK_US_2299

          etc.

          Kinda clunky, but it would be easier than spinning up a full new federated app, and wouldn’t have the side effect of potentially fracturing the community…

        • 33rpm_neutron_starOPEnglish
          2·
          3 days ago

          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.

          • Onno (VK6FLAB)
            1·
            3 days ago

            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.

  • drb@midwest.social
    2·
    2 days ago

    As a thought, HamAlert has the ability to send alerts to a URL and Mastodon has web hooks so theoretically it should be possible to post from HamAlert to Mastodon.