Valid point, as I mentioned in one of previous replies - this is my first ever mobile app and I've used some things along the way that would not work with F-droid builds right away, but I'm working on it as we speak, to make an open source version and make it available for public.

Also inside the platform -> you may delete your account at any time and I commit to never use any customers data outside of the customers experience with a platform itself.

I have a plan for a dedicated F-Droid version of the app. And hope to launch it during the summer still (hope the new google approach to apps will fail as well). It's a little more tricky for me personally as this is my first-ever production-grade mobile app, so it takes some time to figure out the details. For example, push notifications will not work, for better or worse and I'd like people to get notifications when there is a new vegan spot in their city + I use Expo (this felt like the best path initially) which will not work well for F-droid builds.

So it will take some time - but I will open source it and move to F-Droid and hopefully other catalogs as well.

You're 100% right, and thank you for this - OpenStreetMap is our primary data source, so the fact that your contributions aren't showing up is genuinely a bug on our end, not a philosophy difference.

What happened: our last Sweden import was stale, and worse - many OSM places that lack an addr:city tag ended up with no city assigned on our side, so they disappeared from the city page entirely. A place you tagged perfectly in OSM would be in our database but invisible.

We're running a fresh re-import for Sweden right now with reverse geocoding to fix exactly that gap. Your mapped places should start appearing soon.

And yes - fully agree on OSM as the foundation. Free, open, community-verified, no pay-to-play listings. It's exactly the spirit we want PlantsPack to embody.

The fact that you've personally mapped most of the town is the kind of local knowledge no scraper can replicate. If anything still looks off after the sync (should finish by tomorrow morning and I will get back to you about the exact data-import results for your town), you can also add/edit (your listings) directly on plantspack.com - goes live immediately.

Also your input made our scraping so much better, that I aim to improve a global coverage by the end of the day tomorrow using new logic, so if you may confirm that the coverage looks better and if something is still wrong - that will move the needle even more. Huge thanks! 🙏

Thanks for flagging those! I will add a "leave feedback form" in app. But I surely accept all feedback/corrections/suggestions at [email protected] and there is a contact form on the web platform as well.

And i will fix those UI issues asap :)

There are more details on web version, probably still not enough. I did not want to make the place page to crowded with more "technical" data. But I will reconsider it moving on. You may also help me verify the places by markign them in app or on web or suggesting exact changes on web :) thanks

No valid reason tbh. I just forgot about it while building and now have tons of things to work on (also aside from the project). Will make sure to open the repo for contributions asap and notify everyone in the app that it's possible now. Thanks for highlighting it :)

thanks and great question! I run automated scripts every week now and it looks back ~9 days, not 7 - a deliberate overlap buffer so nothing that changed between runs slips through, but for now it's not automatic - it produces the report for me to work on. I'm considering automating it at some point.

Really glad the overall directory quality is good enough, thanks for confimration :) Just added the button to the bottom of the list -> that's a great UX improvement (does not look perfect yet but is on the very bottom of the City page already, will improve tomorrow).

Looking forward to your contributions and welcome to the pack!

Thanks! This is exactly why I'm looking for a feedback. These are real errors from an automated OSM import that got hallucinated descriptions. We've corrected them:

• Joella's Hot Chicken → now removed "Hot chicken" (unless it's vegan replacement) - has no place on the platform, especially if it's a chain. Even if it has a vegan option (I'm preparing a "last chance" filter so that person may see the chains, maybe if there is no other option around).
• Jasmine Thai → now "Vegan-Friendly" (not 100% vegan)
• 10th Street Diner → upgraded to "100% Vegan" where it belongs

You're right that the AI classifier made embarrassing mistakes on these. We have a community correction system (tap any place -> "Suggest Correction" -> you can change the vegan level), and we're running a bulk re-classification pass to catch more of these. Also I've added the "Actually 100% vegan" button to the list of available verifications.

Overall I'm improving the scraping and enrichment scripts on daily bases thanks to reports like this. I'm quite sceptical about current data state, so reports like this are extremely helpful! Appreciate it!

Indeed, that's part of the mission! I'm still educating myself in terms of veganism (being vegan for 2 years so far) while building this, so it takes some time to make it good, but I'm genuinely impressed with how far I could get so far and I have no intentions to slow down and your comment is very encouraging to keep pushing it forward :)

I'm really happy that our directory for your city was good enough and super happy that the place addition process was easy and straight forward. Thanks for contribution! I'm adding C+ and C- (and B+, B- ratings) to the system - this will improve the visibility for sure, let's see where your city ends up.

I will work on a better distinction for vegan-friendly places, so that it's more clear... current idea is to differentiate the places with dedicated vegan menu sections from those that have 1-3 vegan options, but long term idea is for community to rank those places lower, so that they still may be an optional snack-stop, but not promoted and celebrated as more vegan-friendly places.

Also adding the changes to UI to highlight that name fields are optional during sign up -> very reasonable point. PlantsPack is also GDPR compliant and we commit to not use any users data anywhere.

Thanks again and welcome to the pack! :)

Fixed, a little overworked today 😅 Thanks for pointing that out.

wow, I thought it's added form the post fields. Here it is: https://www.plantspack.com/ Thanks for flagging it, added to the post :)

Just added: https://www.plantspack.com/place/lulu-green-boston

The thing is - most of our directory is scrapped using opens source OSM, as we have no budget to scrape google places or other premium sources yet (it’s running 200 requests a day under the free limit to improve the DB), so we’re missing quite some great places. But I’m committed to continuously improve the directory quality programatically and manually and your input has just helped on this journey ;) Thanks

Ouch, three fair hits in one go. Thanks 😅

City score - is a caching setting difference in different components. Fixing it now, it'll match everywhere in an hour.

Bojangles is embarrassing. It shouldn't be on PlantsPack at all - we should not list chain restaurants on the platform. It came in through an old import and I missed it. Cleaning it up today, along with the other fast-food chains that slipped through.

On top of that, defaulting to alphabetical is a dumb thing as well - agreed - I'm switching the default to fully-vegan places first, then highest-rated (not too many ratings yet), then alphabetical. Alphabetical stays as an option.

Fragmentation is real and I think about it a lot. The case for PlantsPack: HappyCow reviews sit in moderation for weeks, listings go stale, and venue owners pay to manage their page (which creates a commercial incentive that affects what gets featured). We have no ads, no chains, no pay-to-play, and I can add or fix something the community flags the same day.

On mirroring to/from HappyCow - love the spirit, but they don't have a public API and their ToS prohibits scraping, so it's not on the table for now (also I'm not confident about all those 250k places, to be honest. and our fully vegan directory is getting closer to theirs every day). If they ever opened ActivityPub support, I'd federate in a heartbeat, but for now - I can't find a valid reason to do that, even so it's technically possible.

General goal isn't to replace HappyCow but to be faster, cleaner, more engaging and community-responsive where HappyCow may have structural reasons to be slow. Both can coexist.

Again - thanks for the feedback. I've just started exploring the fediverse and your take on its spirit send me to an exciting journey!

I will add another post here once it's opened and available. Thanks for your interest :)

wow, happy to hear that! I'd still recommend to check at least google maps to be sure it's open and opening hours are correct. My data is OK, but I can't guarantee yet, unless the verification badge clearly states that it's verified (I've checked quite some places manualy).

I keep improving data every day. So thanks for an encouraging comment :)

I'll definitely consider this. It gets harder to maintain, the more users are joining, so I need to reconsider some of the aprooval flows, review flows etc. to make sure data-quality is at least stable and hopefully improving first. But UnifiedPush will indeed land in the backlog right below the basic F-Droid version

At the moment there are 22 places in Uddevalla https://www.plantspack.com/vegan-places/sweden/uddevalla, I hope your places started to show up. I agree that "vegan-friendly" is not fully enough to describe the range, but I also don't like the split on other platforms, so I'm keeping it as is for now, until I will be more confident in scraping logic or will have enough data to split places with good vegan menu and solid options, form those, where we might have a snack or <3 dishes, but they are still worth mentioning. OSM link is in the making as I write this - should be available soon.

And thanks :)

P.S. I've used diet:vegan=yes on some initial imports, but it may have been a little mixed. I'm continuously running different checks to make sure the directory on PlantsPack is clear agains multiple APIs, but OSM stays at it's core.

That's a great point! We try to address it with shared experiences on city page, that will potentially impact the ratings moving on, so that people may raise the exact concerns you've shared about Tokyo. At the moment, as we've just started - there are not many reviews of places and close to 0 experiences shared, so it's not impacting the ratings, but the core idea is to resolve this. That's why we're also trying to get more vegan-friendly stores, organisations, animal sanctuaries or vegan organisations etc. that may also impact the ratings, however it's quite hard to gather the information in a good way for now.

I'd appreciate if you may share your experience living in Tokyo and/or your current city (let me know if it does not exist yet -> we may add it with 0 places for now or with your favourite supermarket) - this will help a lot. IN the end of the day - the platform is for people not to promote the city or place. Huge thanks for the comment - really appreciate this feedback :)