I'm still working on Habitat. It's a free and open source, self-hosted platform for communities to discover their local area. The plan is for it to be federated, but that's a while off yet. I've made some good progress recently. I've added the ability to temporarily freeze user accounts, custom WYSIWYG editing for sidebar content and functionality that allows the administrator to set site-wide announcements to appear and disappear at specific dates/times. I also got some great feedback from users of my instance of it for my local town and so fixed some bugs.
- The idea: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/location-based-social-net...
- A build update and plan: https://carlnewton.github.io/posts/building-habitat/
- The repository: https://github.com/carlnewton/habitat
- The project board: https://github.com/users/carlnewton/projects/2
Nice idea.
I'd encourage you to embrace full decentralization via blockchain technology. Why? Any successful tech that empowers and connects local communities becomes very politically interesting very quickly.