from plantspack@lemmy.world to vegan@lemmy.world on 23 Apr 13:54
https://lemmy.world/post/45972975
Hey folks - spent the last few months building PlantsPack, an independent vegan discovery platform. No investors, no ads, no tracking beyond what’s needed.
The thing I actually want feedback on is the city scoring system rather than “check out my site.” Every city with ≥5 vegan / vegan-friendly places gets a letter grade A–F based on four dimensions:
- Accessibility - places per capita (adjusted for city size)
- Choice - how many distinct cuisines / categories are represented
- Variety - mix across restaurants, shops, stays
- Quality - review ratings + verification status
The goal is to answer “where should I travel / move to next?” at a glance, and to make it visible which cities desperately need more contributors.
Current coverage: ~37K places across 177 countries, mostly Europe + N. America + SE Asia. A lot of cities still score D/F because nobody’s added the places yet - that’s a data problem, not a “these cities are terrible” problem, and I’m trying to be honest about that in the UI.
What I’d love this community’s take on:
- Does your city show up? Does the grade feel right vs. your lived experience?
- Is the fully-vegan vs. vegan-friendly split a useful distinction, or do you want more granularity (e.g., “has vegan options but the staff sigh when you ask”)?
- What would make this more useful than HappyCow or Google Maps for you? (I’m not pretending to be better on coverage - but I am looking for more pain points to fix)
Happy to answer anything about the tech, the methodology, or the data. Source code is closed for now but the data model is open to discussion.
#vegan
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Link?
wow, I thought it’s added form the post fields. Here it is: www.plantspack.com Thanks for flagging it, added to the post :)
Just took a look at my city (Kiel, Germany). Very well maintained database. Almost every single restaurant and shop I could think off was present, the one that wasn’t I could quickly add.
The C grade feels fair, considering that there aren’t that many purely vegan places and availability depends heavily on which side of the city you live. Maybe a C+ would be okay too, if a grade like that exists.
I think the “Vegan Friendly” label needs some distinctions. There is a difference between a vegetarian burger store that offers every burger in a vegan variant and a kebap store that also has one vegan falafel option.
What makes it better than Google Maps? It is not Google, that simple. I haven’t used HappyCow that much to give a proper comparison.
What I DON’T like about PlantsPack is that it asks for your full name when signing up. It is not required, but that instantly made me not want to sign up until I realized the fields are optional. I am weird like that.
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! :)
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!
Love it! Just needs a space after the city:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3d7bb2d3-acef-43bc-8d6b-321326c21d7d.jpeg">
Fixed, a little overworked today 😅 Thanks for pointing that out.
Dang, Lulu Green isn’t listed for Boston. It’s been regarded as the best vegan restaurant in the city!
Just added: 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
It’s probably out of scope for you, but what always ticks me off a bit with these rankings is that they usually mostly care about restaurants. I think that’s only half the story.
To give an example, HappyCow rates Tokyo the fifth most vegan friendly city in the world basically because it’s huge and in a metropolitan area with 40 million people there’s going to be a few vegan restaurants. But I lived in Tokyo for a bit, and normal shopping is a completely different story. There is no uniform labelling, you can’t even count on allergens, or on listed ingredients (lots of hidden fish, the bone char sugar problem, etc.). Also, vegan food is mostly seen as a part of the health food niche anyway so there aren’t many meat alternatives products, and labels aren’t seen as important. So if you’re not eating all your meals at restaurants I wouldn’t say it’s particularly vegan friendly.
In comparison the tiny city in Germany where I currently live has zero vegan restaurants. But literally any supermarket has a decent selection of products clearly labelled as vegan, not just alternatives (although they have a ton of those too) but just normal products. There literally are Japanese brands that sell clearly labelled vegan versions of some of their products here that are not vegan in Japan. In terms of actually living here as a vegan, it’s significantly easier than in Tokyo. And tbh the next city that has vegan restaurants is maybe half an hour by train and that’s actually not too different from what I used to travel within Tokyo to get to restaurants.
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 :)
My city shows a different score in the overview (F, 29) vs when I click on it (D, 33), and its not clear to me what the differences are. Also, putting bojangles in the top spot is pretty rank. Maybe don’t default to alphabetical.
In the larger sense, this just looks like fragmentation to me. You’re missing a bunch of stuff that happycow has, but I don’t really see a reason to add it, given that its a smallish community. It makes more sense to stick with the largest, where other people are likely to see it. In the spirit of the fediverse, you should consider adding some software to mirror user contributions up to happycow (and grab stuff from happycow to help keep yours up to date)
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 live in the small town of Uddevalla, Sweden. I was surprised to see 7 places show up, all added by PlantsPack Team. However I did not feel it was accurate and I wonder what data you’re based off? It sadly doesn’t seem to be openstreetmap data, which would have made the town 99% mapped because I have personally added almost every restaurant on there! I really think you should focus more on openstreetmap as the foundation, it is free and open and more empowering to the user than google maps.
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! 🙏
Ok that makes sense. I see now that the places listed in Uddevalla have all been tagged as diet:vegan=yes by me on OSM, which I have not been equating with “vegan friendly”, it means more like 1 or more vegan item, or like can I visit this place and have some kind of valuable experience? Vegan friendly is kind of strongly worded for a lot of those places, which makes me consider using diet:vegan=limited but that tag is not very popular and a lot of people want to get rid of it. wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Key:diet:vegan
I reread the OSM wiki wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:diet:vegan and it says for diet:vegan=yes “The establishment usually offers a decent amount of vegan products.” And by that definition I may have been mapping thing wrong, but I still want people to know that they can get at least SOME value out of some place. Maybe using the limited is a part of the solution, and maybe PlantsPack can be used to provide some nuance.
PS you should add directions for OSM linked alongside google maps and apple maps links.
At the moment there are 22 places in Uddevalla 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.