Help wanted! Decentralized, global tile server, for free access to a map tile API for Your next location based application

Hey there, it’s Bo,

I need someone who is really into IPFS, WebRTC, and/or GUN, and best Cesium or location based applications, caching etc.

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https://maptile.io is a decentralized, global tile server, for free access to a map tile API for Your next location based application.

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There is half of the pipeline already existing:

There is a tool to style maps, which makes the osm data look like Google Maps, which is important for the acceptence.

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The other half is our PWA template which has a strong caching policy for already loaded maptiles implemented by the Cesium JS library.

But instead of caching the maptiles just locally (on the user’s phone, tablet, notebook etc.) we use js-ipfs, which makes the browser an ipfs node, which than spreads the map tile cache to the other app users too.

The map tile cache wouldnt be lost with the user closing its browser, since it is a PWA, it can be installed by the user on their phone, tablet, notebook etc…
So every user who uses location based services becomes a fix installed node for the maptile server cluster.

The motivation to keep your local storage available is that your own local requests comes from your own device cache, which is zero-milliseconds fast.
The price for this fast access, is sharing your cache with the local community, so they have fast access either, and vice versa.

Its like you living in New York and have a 100MB offline map saved in Google Maps, so you save the mobile data. (thats the centralized way)

But now, the decentralized way, if you zoom to a new place on the map, the map tile will probably come with lightspeed, paralell from users around the next 5-10km, which already zoomed in onto the same place on the map as you.

Instead of asking the mainserver on the other side of the planet or stressing the CDN network of some provider, and the app owners budget of course. (which would have become your price per request eventually)

Looking forward to meeting you.

Bo

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