Curious if there's any travel apps or sites I'm missing that will log your trips, manually or automatically, with the locations on a map along with your dates of visit. I was just hoping to keep track of my trips in a more comprehensive way, and being able to visualize them while also being able to search by timeframe or by each trip would be nice too.

The Polarsteps app does all of this automatically, but it's proprietary and collects a ton of your data. All alternativetos are proprietary as well.

OsmAnd Maps has a great looking tagging system, with different folders and icons. I know everyone here likes it, but as a casual observer it's clunky and I don't know how usable it'll be for this under the free plan that allows 7 map downloads. It looks like I'll have to download maps for every place I've been. Organic Maps allows bookmarks, but has less tagging features than OsmAnd and is also clunky and requires downloads.

Excel / Libre does great in the manual organization of data for trips, locations, and dates, but Excel's maps are meant for data, with charts where you need to choose either a detailed region or worldview chart.

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

Curious about thoughts on boosting and favoriting here. I’ve only used Mastodon for about a year, and mostly lurk on a personal but also have a business account that posts daily. Maybe you have advice for me or ideas to improve things.

Issue: I feel that these features aren’t being fully utilized, or need some tweaking. Since favoriting doesn’t seem to amplify a post in any way, most people boost things they like, right? This causes a few things:

• My timeline is mostly full of accounts that I don’t follow. One person can boost 30 things in a row and that’s what I get to scroll through, since everything is chronological. Then I get the person who boosted 30 things just before them.
• When I check out someone’s profile, I often can’t even find something they’ve posted themselves. I just scroll through boosted content. If they do post, it's often lost among the boosts when I'm searching.
• Favoriting posts is used far less than boosting, and I almost feel rude if I’m the only favorite on a post that has 100+ boosts.

Ideas: My ideas for possible resolutions mostly focus around filtering through boosts or making favoriting more appealing:

• Have a tab/area where you can see what your followed accounts have been favoriting (Instagram used to have something like this I think?).
• Have a profile tab that shows a user's favorites (twitter does this).
• Have a profile tab that shows only a user's personal posts (similar to the media tab, but for their text posts).
• Have a tab/area where you can filter out boosts from your timeline.

Really enjoying lurking the last few days here. I have no coding experience, but like the idea of self-hosting a few things like Immich, Firefly III, PaperlessNGX, Nextcloud, and maybe Home Assistant. These are great tools even for non-tech people who care about privacy and functionality. I do run Plex off of a hard drive, and like the idea of putting all of this on a NAS in the future.

After an hour tutorial I can pull docker images and run containers on my Mac. But every app has different instructions, and every video tutorial I watch references new things and assumes you already have them or know what they are. Just trying to get any of those mentioned apps above running on Docker led me down rabbit holes about redis, mySQL, Oh my zsh, Xcode, gnu-sed, etc.

So my question is what is a good video course, or learning route, to take to acquire enough skills to download and use these apps? I don't want to do anything fancy, just download and run the apps. What seems super simple to you guys is incredibly daunting to an outsider. Thanks for any advice here.

Edit for posterity: While listening to the Self Hosted podcast, they mentioned this step-by-step wiki called Perfect Media Server, created by one of the hosts of the show, to help newcomers begin self hosting.