OpenFreeMap - a public vector tile server for OpenStreetMap

boramalper@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 192 points –
openfreemap.org
14

There is no tile server running; only nginx serving a Btrfs image with 300 million hard-linked files.

Wow. Btrfs ftw

I haven't dug into the docs much. This really does return vectors? Because all of the OSM servers and services I have seen return tiles that are bitmaps, which for the type of data being displayed always seemed like a rather moronic way to do it.

They generally intend to move to vectors afaik. There was a blogpost and call for donations by them a while ago.

Before anyone gets too deep I'd like to point out that this is just about hosting vector tiles, the actual tile gen is a separate project. Not to say that hosting large sets of files is trivial, just that there's more to the picture than one repo.

https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

I'm curious how much faster it is rather than downloading images

You mean how much faster downloading vector tiles are in comparison to raster tiles?

I think pre-rendering makes the biggest difference, rather than the type of tiles.

Loading vector tiles should require significantly less data/bandwidth while also offering completely linear scaling without any steps. I hope this works well enough to eventually replace the current implementation.

It says in the repo that each file is 450 bytes. And served by nginx which might be compressing it further. So yeah, super duper tiny.

Supporting on GitHub. Just a few bucks a month. It won't take many of us to get to $175/mo.

Are there any android apps that use this yet?

Do you think osmand has any plan to add support?

This is a brand new project so I'm sure no apps are using this yet or even have plans to.