Show HN: Camp Fire – chat with people within a radius (opens in new tab)

Just thought I'd share something I've been working on. Basically it's a message relay that sends messages to others around you (given GPS coordinates from browser). Can choose range from "Range" pull down near top left (hover over options for approximate distances). Back end is written in Rust.

There are 4 people chatting with the word "ignition" over their messages but my range selector (presently "campfire") says "1 in range".

Also, my preferred username, <span style="float: right">~ry, causes some weird layout issues.

With the advent of wifi on airplanes, I made a similar thing called "flight roulette". Inspiration was from chat roulette except instead of matching you to people randomly it would you to people directly below you on the ground as you flew over.

This is fun. In europe we have jodel which has a big userbase. The quality of discussion varies from location and it's fun to listen in what the locals are talking about.

I also got a geolocation error even though I allowed location access. Could benefit from allowing the user to set a location as a fallback (or override). FF 72 (Ubuntu)

I get:

    Error when getting location: 1 User denied geolocation prompt

even though I allowed location access.

Firefox 72.0.2 on macOS Mojave 10.14.6

This is a really cool idea, and I like it so far!! -- would you mind sharing what the different ranges are for each type? I see people chatting, but not sure how close they are to me... Within 10 miles radius? 100?

Edit: I'm on mobile, it seems like maybe it shows on desktop. I'd check but I'm laying in bed haha. Regardless, I really like this idea. Seems like a good way to maybe even meet my neighbors since I moved across the country recently

This is cool! I had been thinking about creating something similar but I couldn't solve this problem:

Given a radius of 5 miles and three users in a geographic straight line, each 4 miles from each other. User 1 and user 2 are in the same radius, user 2 and three are in the same radius but user 1 and 3 are not in the same radius. Therefor user 1 and 3 will only see "half" the conversation (which would obviously be confusing). Do you solve for this problem? if so, how?

Reminds me of yikyak :)

I think the concept is neat, and this could be a worthwhile mode for some chat apps. I would get rid of the cute range names though and just tell users how many km this reaches.

I remember there was a project exactly like this in nReduce (a communal online incubator which sadly died quickly), a few years back.

Looks neat! I like that you show how many are in range. Here's some suggestions, take them for what they are worth.

- Fix the layout on iOS Safari.

- Show the location of all current users (with opt out) on a globe. Users can see where the activity is and who is chatting where.

- Consider adding ignore to squelch certain users.

- Show past messages for your area.

- Add voice messages and autoplay (with opt out)

Wasn't Camp Fire the name of a 37 Signals chat product they later merged into bootcamp? Rings a bell

I have experience with VHF radio emulation, so I wanted to ask what formula you're using for ranging?

I've found the haversine formula to be a robust compromise between accuracy and computational complexity, where on a typical day, I'm doing 5000-200000 haversine calculations a second.

Not sure what it is supposed to do, but currently it does:

    - Ask for location access
    - When granted ask for a user name
    - When given a username show:
      ? in range
      Error: undefind

This reminds me of the Twinkle iOS app by Tapulous. It worked a lot like Twitter, except you only saw posts from within a certain radius. There's now an unrelated dating app of the same name; I can only find this about the original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd4u-E5qmxE

On iPhone Safari (cellular data) I get Error when getting location - 1 user denied)

Even when I set the website permnissions for location to 'Allow'

For a second I got this confused with Firechat (but I guess that's a different setup since proximity is required for direct p2p relay, not just to find people to chat with).

https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/

Great job on releasing the project!

Had a similar iOS app years ago that would make chat groups with everyone in a 1km radius [1]. In the end our largest hurdle was getting enough users together per location.

1: http://www.zonemessenger.com/

It's very easy to impersonate another user right now by just using the same name. It would be great if the first 5 chars of a hashed IP fingerprint (or something similar) could be shown next to the name as a kind of ID to prevent that kinda thing from happening.

There still is — for legacy users — Campfire at 37 Signals (home of Basecamp): https://basecamp.com/retired/campfire

You might want to make 'message-text' have relative positioning, and 'range-display' absolutely positioned so 'ignition' or 'bonfire' isn't hovering over the text box.

Kinda reminds me of Grindr, except for the different target audience ;)

I understand that it's a work in progress, but I could see a polished, native mobile version of this really taking off. I'd be excited to try it, at least.

I tried firestorm (1000KM radius) and I'm alone, seems I'm the only Italian user

pretty cool. I found someone who lives ~15 minutes away from me.

Nobody in range, even if I increase the range.

Try to do something with spam messages

I logged in..

Started getting only spam. Logged out.

what are you using for backend and real time connections?

damn. death by balls of steel.

Location based chatting is a privacy nightmare. How do you protect against stalkers using this tool for triangulating the actual physical location of someone?

If the GPS coordinatates are client-generated, then it would be possible to spoof the coordinates and generate a search pattern rather quickly.

Competition like grindr and badoo try to randomize the distances.