- cross-posted to:
- genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
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Organic Maps is still keeping it real for me
No better time than the present to switch to OpenStreetMap
For Android, I use OsmAnd~ which uses OpenStreetMap data and allows you to download maps to calculate routes offline, something Google Maps couldn’t do for routes by foot and by bike last time I tried.
It also has better coverage for some small paths in natural areas like forests. Give it a try!
This move makes zero sense to me. Why, change it? It’s not it’s official name or international recognized name so wtf
Curry favor with the trump admin
And it will undoubtedly pay off for them. This is the first brazenly tech oligarchy-driven administration.
Remember who was at Trump’s inauguration? Musk, obviously, but also:
- Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
- Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet
.
Trump, a populist president, is flanked by tech billionaires at his inaugurationTim Apple isn’t your friend, either. No oligarch is.
I was hoping Apple wouldn’t be there considering Tim is openly gay
Openly gay, but secretly a billionaire.
And clarence thomas is black.
He donated to Trump right from his pockets. He’s a traitor.
To be clear, they’ve changed names in line with official government policy before, not just for Trump’s admin.
Yeah but that makes too much sense for emotional & reactional people that don’t rely on logic
I get what you’re saying, but the renaming itself is entirely an act of emotion and reaction, with no trace of logic, too. It’s pretty much all we should expect to see from anyone for a while.
They are a private organization with the right to say “lol that’s nice”, and leave it as the gulf of mexico. Executive orders direct government policy.
If something as ridiculous currys favor and infkuence with Trump the USA is truly coming to an end.
I’ll remind you of freedom fries.
It’s not coming to an end as in no longer existing, but it absolutely is as a world power. Maybe it will be for the better in the long run.
The USA is now part of a list of “sensitive countries” with authoritarian states with their own version of reality. When users in one of the countries on this list visit Google sites, they see that government’s version of reality. This is nothing new. Google does it all the time with disputed territories. It’s only news because it’s the first time the US has an authoritarian government.
Here’s how it looks when visiting from a Mexican device with the language set to Australian English while located in Hungary.
Edit: undoxxed myself lol
In Google maps set to Polish while in the UK, it shows
Zatoka Meksykańska (Zatoka Amerykańska)
Which translates to
Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)
Google maps set to Danish in Denmark is the exact same 🤦♂️
But who would want to play golf there
…looks pretty much the same on bing maps, except they’re so committed that they named it twice…
Distraction from:
- closing down the Consumer Protection Agency, USAID, and the Education Agency
- cutting off funding to the universities
- stealing our student, treasury and health records while taking over the purse
- not following federal judge’s orders
- building an unregulated concentration camp in Cuba
- etc.
Edit: That’s why trump did it. All tech companies are in his hands now.
No, there are no smokescreens. Trump is literally this stupid. Don’t attribute to maliciousness what can be attributed to narcissism.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to post this somewhere else:
“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”
So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.
“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review
I think I heard that Trump did it because he thinks it gets him around some Biden era rule that he can’t reverse that bans oil drilling in parts of the “Gulf of Mexico.” It’s really stupid. Exxon and Chevron have both “acknowledged” the name change.
Oh that makes sense. Like when muskrat tried to get out of Twitter suis because the name changed.
pleasing the power, so they remove any law that protect our privacy against google prying eye
It could be simply because they can do it, peasant
Thayana good point. I need to remember my place in this world 🤣
Should look up what they want to rename Greenland
SMH… Red, White and Blue-land…
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1161
Then you must not be paying much attention, or have an understanding of how capitalism functions (nor of how and why it inevitably decays in to fascism).
I also find the word “America” too latino. wouldn’t it be better to change it with an English word?
Why change it?
White supremacy.
Google has the ability to stand up to trump. To destroy him, frankly.
But they’d have to not be little bitches, so I guess they don’t.
I will continue deadnaming the gulf with the name assigned at birth. It’s just going through a phase.
It probably had names before but what did the Mayans call it?
Apparently…
The Maya referred to the Gulf as Chactemal, meaning “the red place,” likely referencing the reddish hues of the water at sunset or its fertile coastlines. Indigenous names were often descriptive, reflecting geographical features or spiritual beliefs tied to the environment. Unfortunately, much of this indigenous nomenclature was lost or overwritten during European colonization.
Link. I’m sure there are better ones. Hard to find good sources.
Organic Maps:
Organic Maps is really cool :-)
Yeah, it’s even better than GMaps for me, because GMaps doesn’t have bike navigation (where I live) while Organic Maps has all the bike lanes marked and navigatable.
Yeah it’s way better for biking and walking. I also find the map a lot more coherent, with GMaps I often had to resort to the satellite view to see what’s going on.
Organic maps updates its dataset once a month or so. It will eventually be updated to the gulf of America, as it is now, technically named the gullf of America in America. See discussion here: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571
Seems like that it is going to be not renamed but they’re adding a “official” tagged name, which is the Gulf of America.
It’s even weirder because America doesn’t mean just the United States
Geographically, America is too ambiguous of a name for the Gulf of Mexico
Wouldn’t the Gulf of California also qualify as being the Gulf of America?
The Caribbean Sea?
Basically every river system from the Mississippi and and the Amazon are also “American” from northernmost point of North America to the southernmost point of South America, it’s all “America”
Naming the Gulf of Mexico “America” is almost as bad as naming a country “earth”
Hey since America is the center of the earth, we should change it to the Gulf of Central America!
Mexico’s full name is ”The United States of Mexico", I think they should rename their map’s version to Gulf of The United States just to add to the confusion and make the point these things, like all facts, are useless when people suffer no consequences from making them up.
Perfect naming, you have my vote!
Really, we could just call it the Gulf of the Americas. That would be perfectly correct in every way.
…but it’s not in any way contiguous with south america; that would be the caribbean sea…
Hmmm, good point. The Caribbean Sea will now be known as the Sea of the Americas, lol. Idk, I was trying to unite everyone.
…good man!..
Question for all non-US natives. When somebody tells you they are from America do you think the continent or the USA?
Saddly the US because those fuckers are just so loud and never shut the fuck up.
And that’s the point of my question, and this change. Trump feels like he won, because he took something away from Mexico.
Yes, agreed. He seems to regard life as a zero-sum game, in which he can’t win unless someone else loses, so he doesn’t understand the concept of win-win. It’s a kind of cognitive bias which is a serious weakness in someone who apparently imagines himself to be a master of ‘the art of the deal’.
Everyone knows what you mean if you say you’re American
I’d really love for someone to come up with a phone OS that I could use on my cell phone. Mine runs on Android and I want to dump all things Google! I read that they have an exclusive deal with reddit where ALL data on reddit would be made available to them for training their AI algorithms. I went on perplexity.ai to check for this and here’s the response I received to my query: The deal between Reddit and Google to share data for AI training and search purposes will likely have significant impacts on Reddit user privacy:
- Increased data sharing: Google will have exclusive access to Reddit’s Data API, allowing them to collect real-time, structured content from the platform13. This means more user-generated content and activity data will be shared with a third party.
- Enhanced user profiling: Google will use this data to improve its AI models and search capabilities, potentially leading to more accurate user profiling across Google’s services36.
- Potential for more personalized advertising: With access to Reddit’s data, Google may be able to create more detailed user profiles, potentially leading to more targeted advertising both on and off Reddit26.
- Reduced anonymity: While Reddit has traditionally allowed for relative anonymity, this data sharing could make it easier to connect Reddit activity with other online identities13.
- Increased scrutiny of user content: As Reddit seeks to maintain its value for AI training, there may be stricter moderation and potential removal of certain types of content or communities4.
- Changes to user agreements: Reddit may update its privacy policy and user agreement to reflect this new data sharing arrangement, potentially granting themselves broader rights to use and share user data6. It’s important to note that while Reddit claims it does not sell personal information to third parties, this deal represents a significant change in how user data is shared and utilized23. Users concerned about privacy may need to be more cautious about the information they share on the platform and may want to review their privacy settings regularly. P.S.: Ignore the weird numbers as those are reference links. I copy-pasted this stuff.
Even in the UK they have put Gulf of America.
The UK Government doesn’t recognize that name and have officially stated they wont (at least in the short term)
I live in the US and I won’t recognize the name either.
…what name?..
Trump signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Executive orders aren’t laws, they’re just memos stating what the federal government will do. Google decided to bend the knee for the new king.
For U.S. Google Map users only, the body of water formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico will now appear as the Gulf of America when using the navigational service.
The change comes just several weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order for the gulf to be renamed and on Sunday declared February 9 was officially Gulf of America Day.
Following the order, Google stated that it has a longstanding practice of implementing name changes when done by official government sources.
(i’m sorry, i don’t recognise most of what you wrote there)
It’s the same in every language, or at least in russian and french.
Everyone should report it as bug.
UK should sue them…
Lmfao, as if Keith would dare stand up to a mega corporation, or a fascist for that matter… I give it a week, at absolute most.
This is pathetic and reeks of insecurity big time. Hope that this debacle improves your QoL, Americans.
Time for a repeat comment: Organic Maps does everything Google Maps does (except traffic conditions), and is FOSS. Please encourage places to contribute business information to Open Street Maps.
“Except traffic” is not a little thing. It’s like putting up an ad for a house with all the features you’d expect, except a roof.
With my daily commute, there are a dozen routes I can take and traffic conditions make it so that from day to day, there can be an hour difference between different routes. It’s literally the only reason I use navigation apps over a cheap GPS unit with no live online connection requirement to navigate.
Traffic condition can only be provided if you track millions of phones. I don’t want that, so I opt out. I don’t want Google to manage traffic for me.
Or you can do it like News stations do and just use a fucking camera feed and police acanner to have someone say “hey - there’s a lot of cars at Interstate 99 and Main” or “There’s reports of a wreck at 300 Elm street”.
Traffic reporting doesn’t require device-level tracking.
to have someone
In order to do this at scale, that’s a lot of someones who all need to be paid. You’d need several people, per city, to manually review traffic cameras and manually issue reports.
Unless you want to pay $200/mo for traffic updates, you can’t do this using humans.
Growing up, we had 5 TV stations and 20 radio stations that managed to do it just off of cereal advertisements. I’d gladly pay 5 bucks a month for it, and with millions of people in the metro area just having 1% of people use a $5/month service you’d be looking at 6 figures a month, which is plenty to pay for the service.
The only way to know if it would work would be to roll the dice and make a startup. You’ll need enough cash to cover a year or two of projected operations, the capital to develop the application and infrastructure in addition to the money required to advertise the service.
At the same time you have to realize that your proposition for potential customers is ‘You can pay us $5 to get the service that Google gives you for free and it only works in this one metro area.’ De-googling is a popular topic on nerd social media but the average person would gladly trade all of their privacy to pay less money.
If we could magic wand a company into existence and capture all of the privacy focused customer base in a large metro area then yeah, the company could pay the operating expenses. But going from ‘This is a cool idea’ to ‘We have a successful service that has a positive cash flow’ is a hard, capital intensive, process.
I think a municipal economic development corporation grant could be an answer.
EDCs exist in lots of cities. The usual setup is they’re given a percentage of local sales tax, and they provide grants to businesses to move into town or start up. When the business is sucessful, they’ll end up paying back more in taxes than was given to them initially, both through direct taxes, but also by providing higher-paying jobs for residents, who will pay more in their property taxes and spend money at local businesses, bringing in more sales tax.
The EDC could pay for the startup to provide the service locally, and then it can spread to other cities, who can either pay for it as a municipal service, or through subscriptions.
I think this is important. That said, traffic info is the whole ballgame for many people. People who live, work, and drive in metro areas frequently use map applications even when driving everyday routes to avoid traffic.
I don’t see Google/Waze/Apple maps getting any less popular unless there is a FOSS alternative that includes live traffic, which does not seem possible while remaining free. People will choose free every time, especially since Google maps works so well.
Personally, I would pay some amount for a privacy-minded alternative, something like OrganicMaps with live traffic. But I doubt it could ever attain the user base it would need to provide accurate traffic info.
Yea, I really wish I had more spare time. Algorithms like this are an area of expertise for me, and I’d love to build an anonymized service that works with Organic Maps. It’s annoying when I know it is something I could make that would support high volume, but just don’t have time for (mainly because of all the ongoing optimization it would require).
Also doesn’t do public transport routes
Talking about FOSS; I prefer OsmAnd because its licence is GPLv3, as opposed to the Apache 2 licence from Organic Maps.
Yup, big OsmAnd fan, too. We use it for backpacking and biking, but have found OM to be more driver friendly, which is why I recommended it here.
The irony is that it doesn’t specify which America.
Something adjacent to degoogling: I am concerned that Microsoft would collaborate with the Trump Regime. I never used Linux before, but I am now downloading Ubuntu. It feels like that I should do a dual-boot setup and get ready to abandon Windows if I hear about MS HQ in Washington having a DOGE presence.
Here’s hoping that Europe and the Blue States are watching Microsoft for anything weird.
Meanwhile on Openstreetmap:
name Golfo de México
name:en Gulf of Mexico
official_name:en_US Gulf of America
Showing just enough acknowledgement to confirm they’ve discussed the executive order, but they aren’t going to follow it.
Ooh I would LOVE to do it and I did that with 2 places but I don’t like:
- The fact it doesn’t show you the best match of your search based on distance by your location (or is because)
- It doesn’t show the 2 places I sent ~1 month ago or they’re hard to find (available on site, not on organic maps)
Google maps was exactly like that before it became the defacto navigation software for most of the planet and we all started answering innocent little questions for our new overlords. I really feel like OSM is on the verge of becoming top tier, we just need a bit more momentum to push it there. And unlike their competitors, it’s highly unlikely you will see anything in any media publication to push users towards them. Google had multiple ad campaigns for maps before it replaced things like Garmin GPS and in car GPS. Garmin and TomTom sold millions of dedicated GPS devices before Google killed their business model.
Its a great app but has some problems I can’t just ignore, the ones mentioned above are what I need and I can’t get it working
The fact it doesn’t show you the best match of your search based on distance by your location (or is because)
That highly depends on the search engine you’re using, OsmAnd for example sorts the search results by distance to your location.
It doesn’t show the 2 places I sent ~1 month ago or they’re hard to find (available on site, not on organic maps)
That’s an Organic Maps problem, they only update the OSM database once a month, and you have to click the update button manually when they do so.
I kinda recommend against Organic Maps at this point. It’s a dumbed-down app with bad routing, bad search, and slow updates. The only thing it has going for it is that it has the best UI/UX (especially for new users) compared to other FOSS openstreetmap apps. If you’re ok with proprietary nonsense, mapy.cz is a lot more fleshed out, and otherwise you should just learn and configure OsmAnd for yourself.
I use Organic Map and both my locations are on the site and if I open the location through the app, I see it but searching lead to no results. No idea why, maybe I can see them because I’m the author?
That’s an Organic Maps problem, they only update the OSM database once a month, and you have to click the update button manually when they do so.
I thought was more. But it’s up to date and I still can’t see the place I uploaded more than 1 month ago, sadly.
Eh I strongly prefer FOSS apps, OrganicMap was a cool project, can’t find a Google maps alternative FOSS and reliable
Just use OsmAnd. It’s old-school in terms of its UI and can be clunky, but it’s FOSS, has hourly map updates (free for OSM contributors), and a lot of customization and features.
This is the only problem I have. It’s great but has a very old UI and some elements are very ugly… i mean, the battery icon is so damn huge! Maybe I could fork and update it myself ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Someone at OM forgot to click the “reindex-db” this morning 🤣
Maybe ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I wish OM was a little better in terms of places + db updates
I’m gonna download StreetComplete, it’s a neat incentive for exercise.
Tip on using StreetComplete: Don’t be afraid to turn off a bunch of things. If you leave everything on you’ll often find yourself standing around one place instead of enjoying more of the area and answering a smaller set of questions.
That’s pretty cool, I didn’t know about that app before you brought it up. Downloaded already!
Surely that is following it? Change the name in American. Leave it the same in English.
It’s kind of a malicious compliance thing. The new name will not show up on any map renders, moreover it’s not likely to be shown in most apps even if you select the object (because
official_name:*is not supported by most apps).Ahh nice, I like it
Planet America, orbiting the American sun, in the galaxy called America
The Galaxy of (truth, Justice, and) the American Way!
