Organic Maps gets their map data from OpenStreetMap (OSM). All OSM stuff is open source and the data is entered in by volunteers. If your area doesn’t have much yet, you should consider being the change by adding your favorite spots!

Other people have mentioned things like StreetComplete, which is an app that helps you fill in the gaps of some OSM data.

and that’s unfortunately only true because the greedy groups have destroyed all the non-greedy ones by slaughter or forced participation

we just need to make sure that we don’t rely on their instance(s) too heavily so we only have minimal losses when they eventually do drop support.

it may be more comprehensive than trying to scrape other platforms, but the data that is available is absolutely nothing compared to what they collect on their own platforms. they’re almost certainly not very concerned with collecting our relatively mild amount of data.

not that i don’t think you could ask about them here, but there are a number of self host communities that you should check out, here are two of the bigger ones:

!selfhosted@lemmy.world !selfhost@lemmy.ml

i learned about GNU Taler the other day from one of the OS communities

hmm that sounds really interesting! if you end up remembering it and also remember to respond i’d love to know lol. yeah i hope if something good enough comes along two platforms will implement and then others will just follow suit.

that’s all very fair, i guess i was just hoping federation was at least on a long term roadmap

yeah, i agree that i don’t think federation of something like this would be through ActivityPub (matrix has its own). i guess it just feels unfortunate that if users want to access communities across multiple instances, users will have to have separate logins and identities for each one.

i looked into revolt and pretty concerned with these two stances of the project

We don’t think federation is beneficial to Revolt

ref

We have a variety of monetisation ideas lined up internally, with these, it is not my intention for us to paywall features and I find it unlikely we would ever do that considering it would contradict what we’re trying to achieve.

ref

like, to me it seems they want to get communities invested and then later monetize in ways those communities don’t yet know about?? idk that sounds extremely sus. especially when competing instances will fight against network effects with no federation.

while I agree they are probably doing this and we should have better data privacy/ownership, the scope of the data they can pull from the fediverse is substantially less than what they get from their platform.

when you’re on Facebook, they control and track everything. which posts you see, which you don’t, and in what order, how long you looked at a given post, whether or not you scrolled through comments, every movement of your mouse, everything you typed and deleted in that text box, where on the screen you touched while you dragged to scroll, what text you highlighted, absolutely everything.

the only data they can probably pull from the fediverse is posts, comments, and like/dislike. maybe which posts you clicked into if that’s public and I’m pretty sure they can’t get which posts were shown to you without owning the instance you’re on.

Not quite what you’re asking for, but during WW2 the US employed Navajo speakers to use their language for certain verbal communications because it was so different from popular languages and hard to decipher. There’s a lot written about them out there. I would also recommend checking out The Code Book by Simon Singh, it’s a great recap of the history of secret codes and breaking them.