My Ad Hoc Social Media Platform - Part 3 : Project Failed (Mostly)

Overall my plan with Slink failed, but I was able to pivot to achieve some success in a new goal.

The weekend started out OK. I was leaving some of my QR code cards around and created a few posts on my site. I figured if nothing else I could use the view count on my posts to get a general count of how many visitors I got, even if no one else posted.

By the end of Friday I noticed about 4 total views, so it seemed like some people were visiting. Then I ran into an issue.

Netbird Died

My mini server running the app went offline.Technically my sever was still online but the Netbird service allowing the VPS to communicate to it died. I am still not entirely sure what caused this but think it may be an issue with the Netbird service and systemd. Thankfully I had installed NoMachine on the server and was able to get remote access to it via another device I had on my home network. With that connection I was able to run netbird up on the server and get Netbird running again. At this point it was already about 11 PM and I was going to bed, when I woke up in the morning I checked my site and it was offline again. Instead of bothering to continue troubleshooting and since after 1 day I only had 3 visitors, I decided to pivot.

New Plan

I decided to fully abandon my Slink site and try to see how many visitors I could get to my general pooploser.net site instead.

Thankfully I had also made some similar QR code cards for my general site and had them in my car. I grabbed those and continued my plan of leaving them around the convention.

My new metric will be number of visitors, which I was able to track with a small bit of code in the header of my site that sends info to cloud.umami.is as well as logs from caddy that would show me the number of redirects and what IP the request came from.

Getting Traction

This is when I started to see some success. On Saturday I had already gotten 17 visits despite missing out on being able to place any of these new QR codes on Friday. I was able to get these in place before Saturday night though which I figured would probably be the best chance I had of getting visitors as a huge number of people come back to the hotel lobby already drunk and would probably be more willing to scan a random QR code they find with POOPLOSER.NET printed on it.

Sunday ended up to be my biggest day for visitors with most seeming to be from the large amount of people hanging around the hotel lobby into the early morning. During the day on Sunday I had a few cards left and a ton of anime stickers I had gotten off Aliexpress a few months ago for another project I was doing. I had also been leaving some of these stickers around for people to grab if they wanted. Today I decided to leave a good size pile of stickers along with a few of my QR codes at the tables they had spread around with cups on them next to water coolers. This was probably the best way of doing things as people seemed much more likely to take one of the cards or scan it if they were getting a free sticker in return.

Results

Ultimately, even though my initial plan failed, I think things went pretty well. I got a total of 45 visitors over the weekend and even had 2 people leave messages for me in my site's guestbook.

I may try this with Slink again in the future. If I do I think the way to go is to leave the codes along with free things like stickers as that seems to help bypass the initial sketchy feeling of a random QR code or site.