My Seek 2024 Year in Review:

* 141 new species observed, of those, the top three kinds:
  * 79 plants
  * 20 insects
  * 16 fungi
* 56 challenge badges earned

June was the month I observed the most new species in 2024, followed by March, and then July.

Seek also gave me a graph of observations per month, and also a map of where I made my discoveries.

Rather than posting screenshots of the Year in Review that Seek provided me in the app, I am posting the relevant content here in a post on my personal site, which I know I’ll be able to search and look up in the future.

Seek is a delightful free (like actually free, free of tracking, free of surveillance) native mobile application for identifying species.

Made by the iNaturalist folks (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app), Seek works without creating an account, and is able to work completely offline to identify species out in the wild (and add them to your local collection).

Seek awards you Species Badges when you discover a number of species of a particular grouping, as well as Challenge Badges when you complete one or more of their monthly challenges that they post.

In some ways it’s like Pokemon Go, except based on finding and collecting observations of real living things.

I have found it quite useful especially when traveling, and wondering is that plant (or animal) the same as one I’ve seen elsewhere, perhaps around home, or is it a slightly different species?

I also really like the good example that Seek provides for how an app can be immediately useful without requiring extra labor (like creating an account, or logging on) on behalf of the person using it.

Lastly, Seek is an excellent example of a truly offline capable app where nearly all of its functionality works just fine without a network connection.

Both of these capabilities (offline first, no login wall) are what we should aspire to when we build #indieweb apps or websites for ourselves and our friends.


This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #yearInReview #iNaturalist #SeekApp

← https://tantek.com/2025/012/t1/eight-years-webmention
→ https://tantek.com/2025/055/t1/three-steps-indieweb-cybersecurity


Glossary:

login wall
  https://indieweb.org/login_wall
offline first
  https://indieweb.org/offline_first

Yesterday https://last.fm/ (@lastfm) emailed their year in review reports, which they called #Playback24 and Last.Year.

Kudos to them for waiting until the new year to do so, and breaking with the pattern of services prematurely posting year in review summaries.¹

They’re also available on the web, without requiring a native mobile app to view.

Mine is here: https://www.last.fm/user/tantekc/listening-report/year

You can find yours (if you’re a last.fm user) by going here:
* https://www.last.fm/user/_/listening-report/year

The page title calls it your #YearInMusic, and the URL your #ListeningReport.

It has many interesting elements, from various top listened lists (artist, album, track), to what percent of 2024 listens (which they call scrobbles) were new artists, albums, and tracks.

Their “Top Tags” time chart is quite cool. Fascinating to see the differences in music listening over the seasons and the whole year.

The report has many interactive features, so it will take me some time to figure out how to save, export, and/or republish my listening report on my personal #indieweb site.

For now I used Firefox to save the page as an .html page to my laptop, and was quite impressed with how much of the information was available in that one file. Much more than #Spotify’s #Wrapped.

That’s step 1. Step 2 is figuring out a good way to blog at least some of it.

This is post 5 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #LastFM #YearInReview

← https://tantek.com/2025/002/t1/indieweb-third-place-community
→


Glossary:

scrobble
  https://indieweb.org/scrobble
year in review
  https://indieweb.org/year_in_review


¹ https://tantek.com/2025/001/t2/first-new-year-review-prior