Joe Dohm (he/him)Jan 27
Rhymes with Turkey

RE: https://a2mi.social/@samfirke/115967387958391720

Anyone is welcome to use this web app at any point, it's live at https://meutch.com/ and I would love feedback from anyone. But as I think harder about getting an adequate initial network for this to get traction, I will need to focus on specific atomic networks of people who will share with each other in the same locale. The magic comes from having people to share with.

Jan 27 at 1:55pmWeb
Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke 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.
Inventaire - your friends and communities are your best library

Make the inventory of your books and mutualize it with your friends and communities into an infinite library!

Inventaire
Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke
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).
Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke
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.
Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke
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.
Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke
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.
Technic - InventaireWiki

Show threadAnaphoryJan 27
@samfirke
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.
Meutch - The actual sharing economy, uncommercialized

Help a neighbor, help the world. Join Meutch to share and borrow items with your community.

Show threadRhymes with TurkeyJan 28

@Anaphory I want to learn from (and team up with?) other such projects. I found https://www.cupofsugar.cloud, they previously had cupofsugar.org whose domain name I coveted and that's how I found them.

My best guess is that it's easier to code a platform like this than it is to establish the critical mass for initial adoption. And that that's where such projects falter.

Cup Of Sugar - Lend to and borrow from your neighbours

Lend to and borrow items from your neighbours

Cup Of Sugar - Lend to and borrow from your neighbours
Show threadRhymes with TurkeyJan 28

@Anaphory thanks so much for sharing Inventaire and giving your thoughts!

Taxonomy of items: agreed I have a ways to go here. I think I will need to learn from how e-commerce sites make items filterable. I like their wikidata approach but for book data I don't think there's something analogous for *all* kinds of items.

I hope to add embeddings-based search which I have used at work with success. I.e if you search for "Allen wrench" it would return "hex wrench" because of semantic similarity.

Show threadRhymes with TurkeyJan 28

@Anaphory American-centrism: I plan to fix eventually. Should be pretty doable, stuff like km instead of miles. Translations would be harder but also doable.

Note that you can already enter latitude and longitude coordinates instead of an address.