My Ad Hoc Social Media Platform - Part 1 : What is this
While looking through open source projects moths ago I came across Slink and thought it looked real cool, but didn't really have any use for a self-hosted social media platform. Fast forward to this week and I was getting ready to go to Anime Central in Chicago and realized this could be a good opportunity to try something stupid like trying to host a Social Media platform. I do not really have any high expectations for this experiment and will honestly be surprised if I get anyone to actually make a post but it is a good excuse to run yet another docker container.
What is Slink?
Slink is a self hosted image sharing platform created by Andrii Kryvoviaz.
It allows you to upload, share, and comment on images with full support for user created accounts.
What is the Plan?
The plan is to get Slink fully up and running on a mini PC in my basement and be publicly available at acen26.pooploser.net with the ability for anyone to create an account and post photos/comments.
In order to direct people to the site I am creating and printing off QR codes that I will just be leaving around places. I was thinking of printing off some on stickers to place around, but that seemed like a dick move and this way if anyone has an issue with these they can just throw them away.
I honestly don't know how people will respond with these. I would hop that most people would not scan random QR codes they find so added the full site address in plain text too. I still feel that most people will probably ignore this or still not trust going to a site ending in "pooploser.net" but I guess we will see.
User Experience
Slink gives some different options for how to handle user accounts. You can allow users to complete the Create Account option and then need admin approval before the account is actually created, allow users to create an account without needing admin approval, or allow users to post and comment as a "Guest" without needing to set up any account. By default anyone is able to view images and comments without needing to be logged in.
Originally I was planning on letting guest users have full access to post and comment as I figured people will probably be hesitant to provide an email address to a random site from a random QR code they found. I still think that is probably true but also figured that giving the whole internet the ability to add any photo they want to a device I own with full anonymity is probably a really bad idea. So, I chose the middle option. Users will need to make an account to post but will not need the admin (me) to approve them. I also am attaching the PC to a smart power plug that I can turn off remotely at anytime and fully kill the server.
Expectations
As I mentioned above, I have pretty low expectations for this project. I think I will probably get a good handful of people that would be willing to go to the site to see what it is, with a few of them willing to make an account and maybe post a single picture.
Over all, by the end of Sunday I am going to guess that there will be a total of 5 users with probably 2-3 photos not including me or my friends.
Next up: My Ad Hoc Social Media Platform - Part 2 : What I did and how you can too!