Part of the puzzle is that Twitter ‘steals’ some of the attention away. A Tweet has to reach an audience between the “for you” feed (with very bland, easy-to-consume messages), advertisements and anything that twitter pushes for profit (advertisements or Tweets by Elmo).

However, Mastodon has an even playing field. If person A follows 100 followers which all toot with the same frequency, the chance that person A sees a toot by B is 1%.

But, it’s also true that OSM is a techy topic and that mostly technical people are on Mastodon.

You’ve forgotten https://mapcomplete.osm.be

Renaming is an option, but often the individual thematic maps come with their own branding, especially if they are commissioned (such as the Pin je Punt-one).

I’m open to rename, but it has to be a catchy name ;) Map Your Theme isn’t to bad, but I’m not very fond of it either…

Also see https://mapcomplete.osm.be/charging_stations - if stuff can be improved there, let us know in the issue tracker

You can easily add them with https://mapcomplete.osm.be/charging_stations

Can we try it somewhere already?

This also sounds a little bit like umap.openstreetmap.fr (which is somewhat unmaintained)

@Ygramul: In my experience, the fushia overlay dissappeared after a few moments - but quite often it would propose to trace a building that had already been traced (thus showing both the fushia and the orange building outline, with the fushia one dissappearing after a bit).

@pierzen: Great to have those numbers.

I suspect that a majority of the contributors are long-standing OSM-contributors testing out Map Builder.

Furthermore, to be counted as contributor in the table above, you’ll have to make at least one contribution and thus get counted into nb_days once. This means that only 200 contributors made contributions on two different days, indicating a very low retention rate.

I have gotten the following question via Mastodon:

does Bing Maps have its own (editable) vector layers besides those imported from OSM?

As far as I could see, the only editable vector layer was OSM. In the ‘tutorial’, the fuschia outlines to trace over (see e.g. the waterbody screenshot) come from some other source. I don’t know where they come from and I didn’t dig into it. (For building traces, I suspect that these are either Microsofts Australia Building Footprint or the building footprint dataset - but I did not verify this)

Valid criticism @woowoowoo! My realistic view on a possible future aligns pretty much with your view - but it is still important to point out a possible threat, to make sure that those scenario’s don’t happen and as it does some harm already today (by confusing and alienating possible contributors).

On the other hand, a bit of exaggeration makes sure that they don’t try to pull of bigger shenanigans (and it helps to get some attention :) )

I’d like to give a bit of context around the earlier statement by Amanda:

The OSMF Board (&DWG) had many discussions with Microsoft about Map Builder. Eventually they got blocked osm.org/user_blocks/5701

For those unfamiliar with the history, an earlier version of Map Builder used a single user account (a puppet) to upload all changes by Bing Map Builder contributors. This meant that it was impossible to trace back a change to a single person, and thus impossible to give that person feedback (or to ban that person in case of vandalism/spam).

As such, the OSMF+DWG decided to block that single account.

@Thierry1030:

1. Bing Map Builder was presented to the OSM-community during state of the map in August 2022. You can rewatch the talk here

2. I was triggered by this reddit post to investigate. I didn’t like the effect of these random usernamesstrings, so I started digging and analysing, culminating into this post. So yes, this is all own research. (Of course, part of my curiousity is because I make an OSM-editor as well, so it is important to see what the others are up to - especially if they claim to be an editor ‘that is simple to use’)

3. I’m not involved with the OSMF; I don’t know if they were aware of these issues, nor do I know if they got in touch with Microsoft about these issues. My main motivation for this post is exactly to make sure they know and to mitigate this.

(Small note to the OSMF: sorry for lighting this fire! I know that you have other stuff to do, and be rather busy with more constructive stuff - but I do think this is important enough to bring it to your attention with a bit of drama. You are heroes to take up such a big responsibilities! It’s precisely because I don’t like dealing with this kind of drama and legal issues that I’ll never run as board member…)

@mikelmaron: I agree that the alarmism is maybe a bit overdone. For all of the issues I mention, good reasons can be brought up (such as the fact that signing up has a lot of friction). Yet, the sum of all these parts is something that deeply worries me.

Second, the alarmism does a good job at getting the message out to get this fixed - the goal of me writing this is that things improve.

Third, the scenario’s and conclusions I’m drawing here are very pessimistic and it the future probably won’t unfold this way - but by thinking about this possible future and communicating it in clear terms, we can, as a group, hopefully get to a better place. The missing attribution and the ability to have two accounts has probably already confused some potential contributors; that is doing real harm.

Indeed, a delete doesn’t exist. I was a bit surprised ad well, but’ll reuse this later on

@lyx: ah, well, that explains a bit! Mangrove has an embedable widget somewhere as well, that might be a solution for opencampingmap.

Hi there,

I want to grow MapComplete (https://mapcomplete.osm.be) into a direction that would solve these usecases. Any interest in testing this?

Really cool!

A fun observation: all images reported are from europe. This is certainly a bug, here is an example of a point which has an imgur image.

The overpass-script is:

``` [out:json][timeout:25]; // gather results ( // query part for: “image~/https:\/\/i.imgur.[…]” nwr“image”~”https://i.imgur.*”;

); // print results out body; >; out skel qt; ```

The only two non-european images (japan) are false-positives (I’ve removed the ‘redirect’ in OSM by now).

AT last, the link to the license is slightly incorrect and gives the image, not the imgur page. An image link such as https://i.imgur.com/ABC.jpg should be transformed into https://imgur.com/ABC (thus without i. at the start and without .jpg at the end).

But still, the end result is very interesting! I’m honoured that other people are using the results of MapComplete to make their own stuff with it :) That’s very motivating for me.

@rtnf: Lol, the link to the attribution does the job - it’s very efficient toward development time XD. It made me smile

Someone also made an unofficial theme once showing all POI with images: https://mapcomplete.osm.be/theme?userlayout=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fseppesantens%2FMapComplete-Themes%2Fmain%2FOpenImageMap%2FOpenImageMap.json

I didn’t include it into main MC, as there is no way to select a random POI type and add an image to it, so it doesn’t fit with the broader vision but it’s still nice.

Oh, btw: there now also exists an automated mastodon-bot posting images daily: https://botsin.space/@MapComplete

@rtnf: Heh, didn’t know that page existed! It’s pretty cool ;)

Just a nitpick: some images are licensed under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, which means that you should show the attribution. Find a snippet of code here on how to extract it.

My second question: why did you create this page?