dorflife.de - The register for rural life

Anyone thinking about moving to the countryside usually finds two things about a village: holiday brochures and property listings. What is missing is an honest answer to everyday questions: Is there a bakery, a doctor, a kindergarten, and how do you get around without a car? And anyone who has found an old house soon learns that rural tradespeople are booked out. dorflife is our own portal for exactly these two moments.

What began as 2,031 Bavarian municipalities was to cover every rural municipality in Germany, without a single page written by hand. Comparable, verifiable and without glossing anything over. At the same time the portal should not read like an official statistic but make rural life appealing, turn interest in a village into a concrete renovation request, and pay for itself.

The data comes from open sources: municipal boundaries and infrastructure from OpenStreetMap, population and location data from Wikidata, plus climate figures from the German weather service, average age from the 2022 census and tax rates from the statistical offices. For each municipality the village check counts what is mapped inside the municipal boundary across five areas: shopping, health, children and school, getting around, and village life, nought to five points each. That produces a profile, a score and a short text on the location. Every municipality page opens with a town sign in front of a village silhouette whose light can be switched by time of day. All pages are pre-built with Astro and served statically - with more than ten thousand pages, the only way to stay fast.

A set of tools has grown around the municipality pages: a village finder that filters by region, size, altitude and amenities, 249 automatically calculated rankings, a village-versus-village comparison and an eight-question quiz on which village suits you. The old-house knowledge base explains house types, construction methods, materials, damage and renovation in 71 articles with a glossary and guides. Anyone planning a renovation answers six questions and is matched with a suitable partner company; the quote and contract run directly with that company.

On top of that come two games that exist for every village. In Dorfschießen, chickens, garden gnomes and the village Wi-Fi fly across your own village square for 90 seconds, with a leaderboard and also as a phone app, without an app store. In Dorffehde you sneak into the real neighbouring village at night, turn the place-name sign around and steal the maypole before the rooster crows. Graphics and sound are drawn and synthesised entirely in code, nothing is downloaded. Four small quiz games about real villages and place names round it off. It is funded through sponsor slots: a company appears on the banner above its village square for ten years. Together with the business listing on the village page and the village shop selling town-sign shirts, the portal now has three revenue streams alongside the building-team referrals.

A calm view switches off all motion, AI-generated illustrations are labelled as such, and for digital assistants every page is also available as JSON, plus llms.txt and llms-full.txt. The portal runs under the umbrella of kommun.ai, our AI citizen assistant for municipalities. The setup is built for three countries: dorflife.at and dorflife.ch are prepared and their data pipeline is running.