There Needs to be a FOSS App or Website for Finding Restaurants
I’ve been on a restaurant kick lately, I guess I’m made of money. One of the things I’ve been thinking about in that regard is that there’s no good way to find restaurants online. Places like Yelp or Zomato are full of fake reviews and sponsored promotions. Whoever can pay the most get the best treatment, usually major chains, while smaller (and better) restaurants languish. And of course all of these websites and apps are full of ads, and take your location data and sell it to Terry Pratchett knows who.
And then it hit me, there should be a FOSS app for that. That is (if you’re reading my blog and somehow don’t know): free, open source software. Stuff like Mastodon and Lemmy are great examples of social media FOSS apps. But there are FOSS apps and websites for nearly everything. I use FreeTube and PipePipe to watch YouTube videos without ads or sponsorship segments. I use NouTube and Phocid to listen to music. I use Element X to talk to my hundreds… dozens… couple of friends.
The one FOSS thing I can’t find is some kind of restaurants review and recommendation app. Something made by communities around the world (or at least here in the US) where we can post reviews of restaurants (really wish there was another word for that so I don’t have to keep writing it) without ads, without sponsorship, and without our location and other data being sold to the highest bidder.
If it were somewhere small like Mastodon, you wouldn’t have to worry about fake reviews, either. Though the downside with a smaller user base would be fewer… eateries and fewer reviews. I love the Storygraph, an alternative to Goodreads, but there are so few users that many of the obscure weird books I like either don’t have reviews, or isn’t listed on the site at all.
Perhaps it could pull data from Yelp or Google, getting… cafaterias menus, photos, and locations, but not reviews. Similar to how Freetube pulls data straight from YouTube, stripping out all the junk. I don’t even know if that’s possible, I’m not a web developer or programmer. I’m simply a guy with a blog yelling about how things should be without wanting to do anything to get us there. Is that really so wrong? Yes.
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