It’s a practical monopoly due to how they’ve exploited their Android presence in the mobile market. The only viable alternative is Yelp. The biggest problem is getting people to jump on the same platform and to leave reviews, and Google does this with mobile location tracking, even prompting the user when they think they’ve been remotely near a location at times. Maybe it does need a fediversed alternative, it is quite the unaddressed monopoly.
It’s a practical monopoly due to how they’ve exploited their Android presence in the mobile market. The only viable alternative is Yelp. The biggest problem is getting people to jump on the same platform and to leave reviews, and Google does this with mobile location tracking, even prompting the user when they think they’ve been remotely near a location at times. Maybe it does need a fediversed alternative, it is quite the unaddressed monopoly.
I found this blog post which gets into activitypub location metadata and integrating it with OSM.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/01/rebuilding-foursquare-for-activitypub-using-openstreetmap/
Sound promising actually.