Oh I’m sure it runs perfectly fine in a container, it’s just not my preferred setup.

Last time I checked, radicale and baikal were the sensible options. I went with radicale, no regrets, but not in a container.

I don’t know of such an alternative. A quick solution would be to use something like GeoNotes to take geolocated notes.

As far as a self-hosted solution goes, I’d just like to point out that you wouldn’t need a self-hosted database of places. You could query Ouverture (or Google, OSM, etc.) for places near you, and you’d just need to store the check-in on your server with a basic API. This is an interesting problem, and not super hard to implement.

This! It’s just the name of the software, not sure why everyone’s getting so worked up about it.

I think it’s a brilliant use case for federation, hope this sees some adoption!