ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • Twitter Circles as LJ Friends List

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    Update April 10, 2023:
    I’ve been seeing some reports that Twitter’s “circles” feature leaking tweets outside of your defined circle. I haven’t seen any evidence of this happening on my account.

    Although, I do see the “circles” callout disappearing from my circled tweets (i.e. the appear to be public) after some time. However, these posts continue to be unavailable to the public and in my tests I was unable to see them from alt accounts.

    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.

    https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/1450223609868218369

    PSS

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

  • Car Co-op Experiment

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    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!

  • Running a Mastodon server

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    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 @[email protected].