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.
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 didn’t know that about happycows TOS. Def don’t want to violate that.
I see from another comment that you’re using OSM data. As an occasional OSM contributor and consumer, have you considered mirroring user uploads back to OSM? Otherwise I will start updating restaurants there and wait for your next sync. What fields are you looking for to determine vegan/ -friendly?
Contributing back is something I’d genuinely like to do - the challenge is that bulk OSM imports require a formal community proposal, import account, and changeset review process, so it’s not as simple as a one-way sync - will work on that once will be more confident on the data quality. That said, individual fixes you add to OSM will flow into PlantsPack on the next sync.
For the fields that matter most:
If you’re updating OSM entries for vegan restaurants, diet:vegan=only is the highest-impact change you can make - that one tag is enough for PlantsPack to promote a place to the fully-vegan tier on next sync. We have 10+ steps verifications and enrichment process for each place, so even if places is not fully described on OMS - it may end up being better represented on our platform + we run extra checks to verify its vegan_level and status with Google API and AI checks.