HexAtlas
hex-atlas.netlify.app

Hello and warm greetings to my fellow news mega enjoyers and to the wider hexbear, lemmygrad and lemmy.ml community,

I’ve been finding myself browsing the newsmega often and was often thinking of a way that would help me contextualize the discussions and news that I’m reading. I remembered an atlas I had in school that would show the location of industries and natural ressources (and more) and decided try to recreate a digital version similar to https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/. When I stumbled upon lemmy-js-client I found a fun way to display lemmy comments geographically, which I would like to share with you:

https://hex-atlas.netlify.app/

⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden

Nexus Features:

  • @[email protected] Bulletins
  • Hexbear Reading List (Thank you @[email protected] for the suggestions)
  • ProleWiki (Thank you Lemmygrad for maintaining this)
  • Wikipedia/Natopedia
  • Anarchist Library

I’m open for suggestions, but would like to continuously add new features:

  • Mastodon.social (well documented)
  • Marxists.org (will be difficult)
  • Moon of Alabama (looks easy) (Thank you @[email protected] for pointing out the transphobia)
  • Usability and performance improvements
  • and maybe more cool features where the guiding ideas are: “IRL Victoria 3 UI” and a “cockpit for newsmega-enjoyers” (e.g. comparing regions and seeing commodity/capital flows, real-time 1% flight data, vessel data - to enjoy the ansar allah blockade, virgin chad ranking, etc.)

Basic usage:

  • You can either search for a place or click on it. You’ll see various scopes: provinces/territories, countries, intermediate regions, sub regions, continent. You can click also on these to change the scope. What it actually does is send it as a search query into lemmy and you see the search results to it (I built a fancy search page). IN the Fediverse Tab you can select the instances, sort types, and other settings from lemmy. On the Nexus Tab you have a similar behaviour, just for the various modules. You’ll see the wiki of whatever is selected on the map :

  • use query to search location by query e. g. brics and find discussions pertaining to the selected location.

  • the query field can also be used to find and filter content by communities that are not listed

  • on Mobile long press pictures to unblur it (not fully tested) on desktop hover with mouse

tldr: Attention [Pink]: Select an option [Purple] to reveal selected information [Yellow].

It’s in a prototype stage so please keep in mind:

  • ⚠️ Spoiler Tags are not implemented thus CWs are not hidden ⚠️

  • It’s mostly optimized for desktops. Sry comrades with old hardware - no optimization, yet :( @[email protected] post inspired me to look into this tho.

  • Provinces/Territories: While I was doing manual edits to some regions I realized I’m doing something very political (duh). Following this, I’m looking for solutions to implement user defined regions (if there’s interest from you) e.g. #fromTheRiverToTheSea #brics #udssr #whatever Comrade @[email protected] offered help, but I have only experience with front-end and am not sure how and what to propose. All my ideas are leveraging the current state of development and might be annoying to you. If you have experience, suggestions, etc. on how to make this work, feel free to start a discussion, reach out, etc.

  • Provinces/Territories: If you want something particularly aggravating changed asap, feel free to start a discussion and vOtE! I’ll update manually.

  • Countries that span two continents are only displayed as belonging to one e.g. Russia - Europe (Dataset used: https://github.com/lukes/ISO-3166-Countries-with-Regional-Codes)

  • Right now this project is exclusive to hexbear, lemmygrad, lemmy.ml and their federated instances. I have an inner conflict: Generally, fuck intellectual property and I would like to make it foss, but this would make it available for lib/chud content as well. Should I? Help me resolve this.

  • No login implemented

Please consider this a tribute to this community, which I’ve been lurking and a member since the r/CTH days (nevar forget). I started web development not too long ago and am deeply inspired by dev titans among others:

@[email protected]

@[email protected]

@[email protected]

Thank you and the mods and admins for making hexbear/lemmy what it is today.

rat-salute

Enjoy your weekend :)

(After I post this I will leave the computer for a while and wont be able to really check and respond for a few hours)

Death to fascism

Death to capitalism

Death to imperialism

Trans rights are human rights

EDIT: After some consideration I decided to make the code public under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ( AGPL-3.0 license )

https://github.com/hexatlas/lemmy-atlas/

https://git.altesq.net/hex_atlas/lemmy-atlas/

    • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      22·
      8 months ago

      click on a place, and stuff related to it will pop up on the sidebar. If you want to know about the West Bank from an anarchist perspective, click on the west bank, click on “Nexus”, then click on “anarchist library”.

    • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      13·
      8 months ago

      Thank you @[email protected]!

      To elaborate some more: You can either search for a place or click on it. You’ll see various scopes: provinces/territories, countries, intermediate regions, sub regions, continent. You can click also on these to change the scope. What it actually does is send it as a search query into lemmy and you see the search results to it (I built a fancy search page). IN the Fediverse Tab you can select the instances, sort types, and other settings from lemmy. On the Nexus Tab you have a similar behaviour, just for the various modules. You’ll see the wiki of whatevery is selected on the map :)

      tldr: Attention [Pink]: Select an option [Purple] to reveal selected information [Yellow].

      • LesbianLiberty [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        8 months ago

        This is awesome! Thank you so much! You said there’s no git repo (I am in favor of Open Sourcing such a neat project tbqh) so I guess I can only report a bug here:

        On reloading the page, if you go east to look at the Americas you will find that no countries in the Americas will be selectable; in addition to the pacific islands I tested (like Kiribati), but if you travel west from the starting position to see the Americas then you will be able to select Americas Countries; but you still can’t select Kiribati. I know this is an edge case and solvable on the user end by just not doing that (and also not investigating Pacific Island nations west of Hawaii) but I figured I’d mention it if you didn’t already have that down.

        • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          8·
          8 months ago

          This is because the map tiles repeat infinitely, but the clickable layer doesn’t. Unfortunately I haven’t found a good solution to this yet :(

          I am in favor of Open Sourcing such a neat project tbqh

          Yeah I tend toward that too. Once I stall with development or know I won’t be able to continue I will anyway at the latest and will make a post.

          • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            3·
            7 months ago

            15 days late but this is pretty cool! We also have library works (in the Library: namespace, which is added before the page name in the URL), if you want to find a way to add them to the tool like you have for the Anarchist library or the threads.

            • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
              3·
              7 months ago

              Ahh sweet! Didn’t know about https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library and I see it’s also linking to marxists.org (albeit seems not as extensive yet), which I wanted to link too

              in the Library: namespace, which is added before the page name in the URL

              Do you know how the from/to parameters ( “Display pages at”) work? Is there a way to filter by county?

              https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Special:AllPages?from=&to=&namespace=3000&hideredirects=1

              At the very least I’ll be able to link to the Library, but it would be cool to filter marxists works by country also

              • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
                3·
                7 months ago

                Editors rely on marxists.org a lot but I want to move away from them because they outright remove parts they don’t like without telling the reader :( they do have one of the largest repos of (socialist) texts on the web and the HTML format makes it very easy to import to mediawiki, but yeah down the line I would want all marxists org sourced texts to be replaced by other sources, even if we need to hunt down and import a pdf copy (which is a pain and slower).

                We filter by categories as well for countries, the format is always “Library works about X”, X being the country. and there is a public-facing API (though it’s bonked right now)

                More generally we have two library category schemas: Library works by X, Library works about X. Sometimes you might have ‘about the’, e.g. “the USSR”. The Cuba category for example: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Library_works_about_Cuba (refer to the URL for the schema and not the displayed title, which we can change on the front-end)

                I assume the from and to parameters use the page’s ID which there is no way to predict unfortunately.

                The library homepage is here, it should make more sense with the visuals: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/ProleWiki:Library

                • hex_atlas [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
                  3·
                  7 months ago

                  Thank you for you patience and taking the time to explain. I don’t have much experience with Wiki, apart as a casual reader, and appreciate you taking the time.

                  Editors rely on marxists.org a lot but I want to move away from them because they outright remove parts they don’t like without telling the reader :(

                  The more you know… Thank you.

                  and there is a public-facing API (though it’s bonked right now)

                  (refer to the URL for the schema and not the displayed title, which we can change on the front-end)

                  Could you kindly elaborate some more?

                  Atm I was only able to add a simple " 📚📕 All library works about {activeAdministrativeRegion.country} on ProleWiki." to https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Category:Library_works_about_${activeAdministrativeRegion.country} on Top of the ProleWiki Tab.

                  Sometimes you might have ‘about the’, e.g. “the USSR”.

                  Unfortunately I don’t have solution for this atm, but looking to add user defined regions in order to lay the way to for linking to USSR, BRICS, etc

                  I assume the from and to parameters use the page’s ID which there is no way to predict unfortunately.

                  Hmm ok. If there’s an API that gives me a JSON response of the book (pages) I would be able to integrate it similar to the Anarchist Library or the 72T Bulletins… The current implementation (not the Library, but the Country pages) uses the HTML response from the API (https://en.prolewiki.org/api.php?action=parse&page=germany&format=json&redirects). Is there something like this?

                  Also, unfortunately the HTML body has relative links and these aren’t working (click on any of the wiki article links and you see what I mean). I thought I had a solution to make the links absolute by injecting the wiki base URL on Click, but i broke the sources as these are absolute links already. Not sure how to go about solving this. Do you have experience with this?