I'm working on a game that helps with this. You leave your little bunker in a post-apocalyptic world and find the land around you contaminated. You walk, run, any workout, to claim territory around you, and gain energy you can use to clean up. You start building greenhouses to grow food and start rebuilding the ecosystem. It's all on the real world map underneath you, and all the interactions between people in the game are cooperative: you get more benefits helping another player with most actions than doing the same thing in your own territory.

The game tricks you into going for walks or runs regularly since you need those energy points for everything, and I'm building out more cooperative behaviors to give you reasons to go walk with someone else, go work together to fight an alien infestation, and more. You'll discover other players in the game who are near you in the physical world, and be able to request help, thank them, give them benefits, all positive.

I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy, but they've never leaned into actually helping people improve their fitness, or work out together. I'm hoping I can help solve this problem you're talking about, at least for getting people fitter!

> I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy

What's your monetisation plan and how can we be assured that the data collected won't be used for military purposes?

Oh yeah, that's a good point about them. And thank you, this is a great question. That's another reason I wanted to do this, I don't like what they've become!

Since I do actual workout tracking, all health and fitness data and raw location data stays on device. The only thing I send back to my web service is what interactions you've made with the game world, what you've captured and built. I have no plan to have you take photos of anything, either. I won't have any monetizable data, really.

My plan to monetize is an optional subscription that gives you more capabilities, like having more allies together, being able to build more than one thing at a time, and being able to hold more energy from a workout before your meter caps. If it gets successful I'll definitely do paid cosmetics. I also think there's an avenue for me to get grants from local health departments if I can prove I increase people's fitness through the game, but that would be opt in and way down the line.

I'm a big fan of not growing your company speculatively, and instead proving out your revenue and growing organically.

What else would you suggest? If this ever got big enough for its own corporate entity I think I would bake a lot of protections into the corporate structure, and definitely be a B corporation.

This sounds awesome! I’d love to playtest it when you’re ready.

Faster than I thought! Here's a link: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co

Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!

Nice! I’ll check it out. Congrats on the soft launch!

I appreciate you! I'll come back here and comment soon. :)

Link if I want to stay updated? Sounds cool

Sure! I'm not quite ready to testflight. I'll reply to your comment when I've got a page up. :)

Faster than I thought! Here's a link: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co

Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!

Ping me when you're ready for Android/web users :)

So far I don't know how to solve one problem there, but I'm open to ideas! It's very easy to inject fake fitness data in both of those platforms. With CoreMotion, iOS/watchOS give you a lot of inherent anti-cheat for free.

Faster than I thought! Here's a link: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co

Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!

Meetup used to be that until they got greedy and started charging everyone. It collapsed very quickly after that. It's a ghost town now.

I tried that, and started with the cheaper host option.

My meetups rapidly filled up with fake people, so real people couldn't sign up ... unless ... I signed up for the more expensive plan.

I gave up on it as a scam, at that point.

Yeah, the internet was originally an extension of the real world, and it probably should have stayed that way.

Would be cool to have an embedded typeform-type widget that compliments disqus that takes the following flow: - are you interested in meeting offline? - which country? - which city? - enter your email to get updates (or check back here)

Then when there’s enough demand, you’re shown meeting spots and times to vote with RSVPs.

The key is the widget has to be embeddable and agnostic of the content so it can manage itself based on sensible rules (only show possible events when there’s enough demand, but make the demand really easy to measure).

mom&pop social media is the old thing, and like other mom&pop things that got steamrolled by their equivalents of Walmart, it is highly unlikely to ever return.

95% of people choose utility and convenience over ideological preferences, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I too miss the old Internet sometimes, sure, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'd much rather deal with anonymous strangers or LLMs than ye olde phpbbs with their anal moderation, resident schizos, and weird cliques.

There's no shortage of anal moderation, resident schizos, and weird cliques in show on the "Walmart" communities.

Anal moderation! “I only poop one ounce a day tyvm”

I don't like this argument because it assumes that money should rightfully dictate everything in our lives. Also disagree that there is a "choice" when it comes to consumer spending, as if there are any public options for consumer spending in a neoliberal economy.

If you’re into running, cycling, etc. Strava can easily function in this way and does. I’ve made a bunch of friends and been introduced to groups and routes through my interaction with initial strangers

Problem is no one visits those sites. Everyone visits the same sources of content robotically, they need to be taken on a random walk by something to find new sites.

Ironically in real life most offline activities of these kinds that I know of are facilitated on Facebook groups.

Well, most platforms operate primarily as an algorithmic scroll based feed, and the actual utilities (like event planning, or marketplace) are related to second class citizens – used mostly as a hook to get you to stay logged in.

I've had a lot of success lately relying exclusively on Partiful as my one social app. I know it's nearly an inevitability though before they will need to monetize and introduce some way to ruin the elegance.

(My proposal for the modern successor to Zawinski's law: Every social media platform attempts to expand until it has a scroll-based algorithmic content feed).

Distribution, getting people to know that the event exists is the hardest part. Scroll based algorithmic feeds are good at helping you with this.