As consumer choice proliferates, people will rely even more on online reviews to inform their decisions and navigate offerings. Reviews have become a powerful tool and valuable source of insight for individuals and businesses alike.
The problem we have today is that hundreds of millions of people are feeding their valuable insights currently into proprietary data silos of a few dominant platforms, where they cannot be used for the public good.
The Open Reviews Association is a non-profit initiative to change that. Our vision is a future in which everyone can share and make use of reviews freely.
Which is why I’m writing my reviews on https://mangrove.reviews/ (from the Open Reviews Association) now instead of Google Reviews and Tripadvisor, which are both American and proprietary too. Mangrove is far from being as refined and known as the popular options but I choose to support them because I feel like they’re going in the right direction.
Some highlights:
- They’re FOSS
- Big focus on privacy (accounts without the need for personal data, not even an email)
- The Open Reviews Association is Swiss
- You can review Places of Interests (based on OSM), Websites, Companies and Books
- It’s already integrated in Mapcomplete.org
- The data is downloadable
You can read more about it on https://open-reviews.net/ or the link above. What do you think about it?
Do they accept federated ActivityPub or IndieWeb mentions?
I don’t know about IndieWeb but they have an issue open on gitlab for an integration of Activity Pub: https://gitlab.com/open-reviews/mangrove/-/issues/45
Cool stuff, thanks for finding and sharing!
I thought that’s spelled Luxury Yacht.
