A small web app where people appear on a world map
Details
- External ID
- 46472954
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A small web app where people appear on a world map
- Website domain
- mapmates.io
- Launched
- Jan. 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.2549407114624506
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I've moved around a lot. Finding information is easy. Finding people is weirdly hard.So I made this — a map where you drop a pin and see who else is around.Filter by digital nomads, freelancers, remote workers, retirees. See if they just arrived or have been there for years.Spot someone interesting? Send a message.No signup. No feed. No tracking. No algorithm. Just a map.More like exploring than scrolling.Built with Next.js, Supabase, and Leaflet.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche social and community platforms
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Communication
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- web app to see people on a world map
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a standard social directory web app combining interactive map pins (e.g. Mapbox/Leaflet), basic authentication, and simple CRUD messaging.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Real-time visitor location globe tool (commenter's similar product)
Concerns raised: Connection scaling costs with many concurrent WebSocket users, Pin clustering behavior becomes chaotic at higher zoom levels
Feature requests: Show trail or fade-out animation when users leave instead of instant disappearance, Clarify clustering algorithm (quadtree vs distance-based)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 84 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #76 of 85 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 63 days after the earliest competitor.
- OutMap · hn · 2026-08-24 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Charted · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Agentic Engineered Social Connections and Travel App · hn · 2026-09-28 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- How many people live within an hour walk of you? · hn · 2026-07-28 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Serendipity · hn · 2026-09-01 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Bored People Chat · hn · 2026-06-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Whereabouts · ph · 2026-09-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I built a site that shows every world event you lived through · hn · 2026-04-10 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.