Find people to build with. Everyone who has the page open right now appears on a shared 3-D globe, placed by their IP address via the ipstack API — no sign-up, no location permission. Say what you're working on, and CollabFab ranks everyone else by how worthwhile a conversation between you would actually be.
Built with ipstack, an APILayer product.
- Cartoon vector globe that swaps to real raster map tiles as you zoom, all the way down to street level, then hands back to vectors on the way out.
- Live presence — a session heartbeat puts you on everyone's globe within a few seconds, with a shared activity feed so you can see who just arrived.
- Session-scoped profiles — name, bio, what you're looking to build, and how to reach you. Stored against a session cookie, so closing the browser or clearing cookies wipes your identity for good.
- Full ipstack intel per visitor: coordinates, city, region, country, languages, currency, timezone, ASN, ISP, connection type and security flags.
- Handshake Score — see below.
This is the part that makes CollabFab more than a map. Everyone else on the globe is ranked by how worthwhile it would be to actually talk to them, scored out of 100 from live ipstack fields plus whatever the two of you chose to share:
| Signal | Max | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Working-hour overlap | 35 | time_zone.gmt_offset |
| Common language | 20 | location.languages |
| Shared interests | 20 | profile tags |
| Proximity | 15 | latitude / longitude |
| Network kinship | 10 | connection.asn, connection_type |
Working-hour overlap carries the most weight: two people who are never awake at the same time will struggle to build anything together. Unlike the usual black-box "likelihood" number, every point is attributed to a named line with the evidence behind it — open anyone's card to see the full breakdown.
npm install
npm run devCreate .env.local (see .env.example):
IPSTACK_ACCESS_KEY=your_key_hereGet a free key at ipstack.com. Presence is stored in a
local SQLite file (./collabfab.db) by default; set TURSO_DATABASE_URL and
TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN to use Turso in production. The schema is created on first
request — there is no migration step.
The security, time_zone, currency and connection modules aren't on every
ipstack plan. CollabFab detects a restricted plan once, downgrades its requests,
and falls back to estimating the UTC offset from longitude and the ISP from
reverse DNS — every surface labels those values as estimated rather than
presenting them as ipstack data.
Raster tiles come from OpenStreetMap, which is free to use with attribution.
OSM asks heavy consumers to move to their own provider — point
NEXT_PUBLIC_TILE_URL at any {z}/{x}/{y} endpoint to do that. Tiles are cached
in the browser's Cache Storage, so a route you've already flown costs no network.
The people icon in the toolbar adds a clearly-labelled simulated crowd so the
globe can be evaluated solo. Those visitors carry a dashed ring and a SIMULATED
badge and can't be waved at — they are never mixed in with real people.