this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Do you think it's worth building fediverse alternatives for transportation / distribution services? (reddthat.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service. I realized there weren't any so I started developing one on my free weekends.

While I haven't made much progress so far, I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software. Also, I cannot overlook the effect of such services on the planet (see Amazon, Uber, and many more).

With all this as a context, I have been asking myself the following questions:

  1. What would be the impact on society (especially inequality) if there were open source alternatives to such services?
  2. What would a common core look like? (i.e. what is the WordPress equivalent for transportation/route planning, is OpenStreetMaps enough?)
  3. What domain specific knowledge would it require to build such a software? (while in university I researched about the travelling salesman problem, anything else?)
  4. What safety protocols would we need to develop when there is no corporation insuring users? (i.e. if I order something from Amazon and it's dead on arrival, I get either a refund or a replacement shipped to me for free)
  5. What's the proper terminology to describe what I am describing?

Feel free to add any questions of your own. I created this post because I am free this afternoon and I wondered what it would like to discuss this with strangers instead of pondering on my own.

Edit: My free afternoon was taken away by an incident I had to respond to, it's now late o'clock here, but I will do my best to reply to all you magnificent people.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At some point I was searching for an open source car pooling service.

I have been observing how much as a society we have been relying on route planning software.

I think social factors for car pooling are far bigger than route planning. Getting a group of people on the same schedule with the same general destination would seem the problem most haven't taken on. The route planning would probably be better done with real-time data once you have identified people within reasonable distances willing to share transportation at a similar time.

There are open source routing efforts: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I think social factors for car pooling are far bigger than route planning.

To be honest, I wouldn't trust an algorithm to decide with whom I ride. I would like to see a few people that match my schedule and route, and then individually inspect their profiles and make contact to arrange the trip details.

What would you expect from a service that matches people into car-pools?