Category: Culture

Categories
Culture

Twitter Circles as LJ Friends List

February 2023 is a weird time to write about the now Russian-government-controlled LiveJournal but suffice to say that I spent a great deal of my early 20s socializing on LJ, it was a very important part of the 00s to me.

In this post I’m going to discuss LJ’s “friends” features and how we can make Twitter a little more friendly by emulating LiveJournal circa 2001.

LiveJournal’s friends lists were implemented in a very specific way that I’ve never really see duplicated anywhere else in any social network ever since.

Here’s how friends worked on LJ:

LiveJournal.com basically had two views: your own journal (think of this as the “profile” section on twitter.com) and your “friend feed.” You could browse to another journal (or community) and read its posts in reverse chronological order if you wanted to, but generally you’d spend most of your time on LiveJournal use browsing your friend feed.

The friend feed was populated by reverse chronological posts of all the people (and communities) you followed. Basically twitter.com before it was enshitifed.

Now here’s the killer feature. When you published a post to your journal, you had three visibility levels: public, private (only you could see your own private posts, I think some people treated their LJ as a traditional journal) and finally “friends-only.”

The friends-only posts were semi-private, only logged-in users (not communities) on your friends list could view your “friends-only” posts, they’d show up in their friends feed alongside all the other public or friends-only posts from their friends. [Technically, it didn’t matter if you were mutual friends – as long as you’d friended someone they would see your semi-private posts – but most of the time you would be.]

These friends-only post enabled a really cool asynchronous interaction with your friend groups that I haven’t really seen on any other social network. Also, LiveJournal posts had a robust commenting system enabling your mutual friends to interact with each other in comments on your LJ. [IIRC comments also had visibility levels such that not everybody reading could necessarily see all the comments.]

That’s it, that’s the killer feature right there. Friends Lists.

Enter Twitter Circles

Twitter circles are essentially the “friends-only” visibility mode for your tweets. They enable you to post semi-private tweets only visible to the accounts you’ve selected (“friended” in LiveJournal parlance).

The only thing that’s missing in order to create the full-cirlce LiveJournal-esque experience is the friend feed.

Luckily, you can create it!

I created a private Twitter list (called “circled”) and added all of the accounts that are members of my Twitter circle. I’ve also pinned this list which causes it to appear as a tab next to “for you” and “following.”

This way I’ll have a section of twitter does a decent job of acting as a friend feed. A quiet little curated corner of Twitter. TBH it’s one of the things keeping me locked in to Twitter.

As an added bonus, Twitter seems to be resisting enshitifying the lists feature. It seems to be non-algorithmic most of the time.

The main downside is having to manually sync my “circled” list with my twitter circles members. But I haven’t found myself adjusting my circles often so it’s not really a major hassle.

If you’re frustrated with the way that Twitter is right now, I’d strongly suggest trying out circles + lists.

PS

I still remember an email I sent to the creator of LiveJournal. I reached out to him about it on twitter a couple of years ago and he actually replied. Like I said in that previous post Twitter is punk rock.

PSS

LiveJournal “communities” were also really cool and innovative, but that’s a topic for a future post.

Categories
Culture Winnipeg

Car Co-op Experiment

Well, not yet. Not literally.

Winnipeg’s Peg-City Car Co-op has been on my mind recently for one reason or another. I’ve come to the conclusion that if they opened a station on my street I would probably immediately get rid of my car!

When I say “my street” I literally mean my street. There are 3 rarely used parking lots on my block (within 3 minute walk) and my street would be good location if they decided to expand their network westward (Philip Mikulec, if you’re reading this DM me).

I ran this idea passed my wife and she rightly brought up concerns about availability and cargo space. So, I thought I should step back and do something like a feasibility study.

So for the next month, I plan on logging all of my car trips in a spreadsheet.

I am going to be logging two categories of metric.

First, I’m going to log cost of using a co-op car. Cost is defined by the duration and distance of the trip. I’ll flag trips where I might be able to use their new floater service as those trips should be less expensive.

Second, I’m going to log “feasibility.” One of the biggest reasons for owing a car for me personally is being able to have a vehicle available at my beck-and-call. With two growing kids and a wife with mobility issues, it seems valuable to be able to hop into a car at any time.

To log feasibility I am going to use the following three attributes:

  • Timely: Appointments, meetings, picking people up at a specif time, that sort of thing. Since car co-ops have limited stock, I’m assuming it may be difficult to always get a car at a specific time.
  • Spontaneous: Basically, any trip that was taken without prior planning. This could be an emergency or a random drive in the evening.
  • Large: Again due to limited stock I assume we would not always be able to get a larger vehicle if needed. For this metric, I will use any load that takes up the entire floor space of our Santa Fe to signify a “large” load.

Without actually using the service it’s going to be impossible to know if a car would have been available to me during these trips. So for the sake of quantification, if any two out of these three factors are present for a given trip, I deem that trip infeasible with a car co-op.

Hypothesis

My total cost will come in under the $833/mo the average Canadian spends on car ownership. I think I am an ideal candidate for a car co-op: we are a one driver household (for now), I work from home full time, our kids are teenager (and already accustom to taking public transit) and our neighbourhood is extremely walkable.

Other factors

I understand that people who use car co-ops typically change the way they use cars. They group trips and drive less frequently. In addition to the raw calculations, I will attempt to analyze the data and come up with alternate stories for how I could have used cars over the month. There might be some interesting findings.

My data set will act as a sort of “worst case scenario.” Meaning, if I didn’t change my behaviour this is how much it would cost. As such, my data should also be able to quantify the real cost of having a car available outside your door 24/7.

I hope to have some interesting findings. See you in a month!

Categories
Apps Culture Tips & How To's Winnipeg

Running a Mastodon server

I ran a mastodon server over at winnipegsocial.online for about two months. I took it down last over this past weekend.

When the mastodon exodus started to bubble up I thought I’d jump in feet first and find out what it takes to run a server.

Overall, it was just about as easy as I expected. But at the end of the day, almost nobody used it and it was costing me a lot of money for what was had become my own personal mastodon web client.

Setup & Upkeep

I’d say the complexity of setting up a mastodon server is right around “running ubuntu on the desktop and installing a package that’s not present in the package manager” complex.

It’s almost point-and-click, with a couple of additional steps.

DigitalOcean and friends all seem to have 1-click installers to get the web server portion system.

In addition the the webserver that’s runs the Mastodon application itself, you’ll also need a CDN to host media and a service to send mail.

FWIW, I chose DigitalOcean’s “spaces” mainly for the convenience of having only 1 bill. I chose SendGrid for mail, due to their generous free tier.

If you’re interested in setting up a Mastodon server and you’ve ever messed with Linux, I’d say “give it a shot.” DigitalOcean’s guide covers pretty much everything you need to know.

There was literally zero day-to-day maintenance. And no need to moderate anything.

Cost

US$35/mo. ($5 of that is storage, no backup, no mail cost)

I originally spun up my mastodon server on DigitalOcean’s cheapest 1GB RAM server plan. The webserver and all its systems actually ran really well.

However, when it came to upgrading from Mastodon v3 to v4 I repeatedly ran into problems. Eventually realizing that NPM was exhausting my system memory, so I had to upgrade to a 2GB server in order to complete the upgrade.

I shut it down

When I asked my twitter followers how many people were interested in joining a Winnipeg-based Mastodon server mid-November, 25 out of 36 people responded positively.

After two months of operation, the server had fewer than 30 users and I was the only users who’d posted more than a handful of toots. It just didn’t make sense to continue to pay to use my own instance when I could just as easily hop onto another one.

At the end of this experiment, I don’t think I understand the purpose of location or theme-based Mastodon servers. Sure the Mastodon server has a “Local” UI that displays posts from users you follow on the local instance. But I guess I don’t really see the purpose? They’ll show up in your freed regardless 🤷‍♂️

In terms of Mastodon as a Twitter alternative, I have many thoughts. But that’s a blog post for another blog time.

Anyways, for now you can find me @ohryan@mstdn.ca.

Categories
Culture

On Social Networks and Twitter

I have been extremely online since the late 1990s. I’ve been using The Internet socially since I was a teenager, so the concept of a “social network” has always seemed a little reductive to me.

For me and my peers, a social network is maybe a more connected and organized internet experience. A simplification and centralization of a bunch of tools we were already using.

In light of the recent acquisition (and subsequent workplace hell) of Twitter by Elon Musk I’ve been giving some thought to why I like(d) Twitter and how I’ve been using The Internet socially over the years.

I’ve come up with a short list of things I look for in a “social network.”

Curated News

News is the foundation of many social interactions. It gives us something to talk about.

I’ve never been one to religiously check a particular edited “newspaper” daily. I find that they always have too much and too little of what I care about.

Similarly, RSS has never really worked well for me as a source of news. As soon as you follow one or two more active sources, you end up with a giant inbox of unread articles every morning. I don’t enjoy wading through every single news story in the universe to find the ones I might be interested in.

Purely algorithmic news (recently via Apple News) is just as bad, or worse. The news algorithm never quite finds the right articles for me either.

Reddit is decent. However, I seem to have curated a feed where the news:lulz ratio skews highly “lulz.” I kind of like it that way, I don’t go to Reddit purely for news.

On Twitter thought I’ve been able to tune my feed to act as a curated news source (with low lulz volume). I rarely blindly follow someone on Twitter without first taking a cursory look at their timeline to see if they’ve posted links or retweets that I’d be interested in.

This approach has given me a timeline that’s full of good quality content that I’m genuinely interested in reading.

I try to be cognizant of the echo chamber this might create but to some degree this feels like a problem outside the scope of a social network. Keeping in open mind is more important than anything else.

World-Wide Friendships

Ever since the early days of IRC one of the most compelling features of The Internet to me has been the ability to have genuine social interactions with people from around the world.

These interactions typically take the form of semi-asynchronous, low stakes, casual comment threads.

But every once in a while these casual interactions become true friendships and slide into more synchronous messaging.

As an introvert, I’ll often start up a DM conversation with a friend to fill the time nervously waiting for something in an unfamiliar situation. Be that waiting for a business meeting with a new client at a restaurant in Winnipeg or anxiously waiting for a flight in Munich.

The Internet has truly made the world a smaller place. Social networks and their adjacent messaging systems enable this. And it’s awesome!

An Audience for Thought Bubbles

The Internet has been ingrained in my life for so long that posting an interesting thought or unusual question to “the internet” is a natural outcome of my thought process.

Twitter is the perfect medium for these types of thought bubbles because the character limit strongly encourages short content.

I could technically post all of these little thoughts and questions here on this blog but even if my blog had an audience the size of twitter I doubt I would get the same level of quality engagement. Blogging is fundamentally different from tweeting. It’s the reason I have written over 22,000 tweets and only published 433 blog posts.

Twitters’ focus on the character limit has sets it apart in the history of social networks. It’s one of the biggest pieces of its success.

A Central Meeting Space

Social networks serve an important role as a central repository of “you.” A place where people can find you, find links to the broader you and even meet you.

Theoretically a personal websites could serve the same purpose but the killer feature of any social network (by definition) is its tendency to put your face in front of people you don’t know and who you might like to meet.

Punk Rock

You can @ or DM almost anyone on Twitter and — with the exception of the biggest names and most “important” people — you can expect to receive a genuine reply from them.

This is one of the coolest things about Twitter. I’ve never had this experience anywhere else on the internet. It’s the punkest of rock.

These various components of a good online social experience have been available online for decades. IRC, Geocities, ICQ/AIM/MSN, forums, LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram just to name a few of the places and ways in which I’ve experienced them over the years. Not to mention the probably a half dozen websites and apps we’ve all totally forgotten about.

Twitter is special.

Twitter has collapsed social interaction into one platform in a unique way that will be very difficult to supersede. In fact, I don’t think we’ll ever have anything quite like it again and I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Mastodon and other apps attempting feature parity are missing the magic. There’s something intangible about the way that users have come to interact on Twitter that can’t be replicated by features alone.

The next Twitter will look quiet different.

Categories
Culture Winnipeg

The False Dichotomy of Bikes v. Cars

I’ve been engaging with a lot of anti-bike folks on twitter over the past few months.

Observations and Thoughts.

[Note: these people are sometimes pejoratively called “carbrains” but that’s unfair, I think at lot of people share these views, even if they are not against bikes]

1. The built environment is immutable.

When someone says “Winnipeg is a car city,” they’re stating a fact, like “the sky is blue.”

It’s not right or wrong. It’s the way it is.

Whether it can or should change is beyond consideration.

2. Driving is frustrating.

Their arguments undoubtedly include an anecdote about a frustrating driving experience. Often with an accusation that I must never have experienced a similar frustration.

Drivers demand funding for road improvements as a remedy to this frustration.

3. Induced demand adds frustration.

While it’s important to inform drivers that adding more roads won’t solve their driving frustration, pointing this out only makes them more frustrated.

You’ve just told them that they live in a frustrating environment with no way out.

4. Cycling infrastructure demands that everyone bike.

This belief stems from a feeling that bike lanes are disruptive and expensive. So funding them can only be justified if most people bikes most places.

And it’s a nonstarter b/c of the how far most people would have to bike.

5. Safety isn’t a consideration.

Car violence is seen as state of nature.

Cars are so ingrained in our world that we’ve come to regard them as similar to a force of nature like weather.

Much like the built environment, it’s just the way it is. Shit happens.

Ok. So given these observations, I think we could make great strides by emphasizing the positive knock-on effects of funding bike lanes.

Namely that bike lanes actually make driving EASIER, save money and are a better use of land.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/14/why-drivers-should-support-bike-lanes

I would even go so far as to say that the tension between the two groups is false.

Bikes and cars are only at odds with each other because of 70 years of poor planning based on bad math.

Once you understand that the way forward becomes clear.