Test Post and musings

[AkioOhtori]

I'm out of juice for tonight, but wanted to try making a test post.

This place is... cool? It doesn't quite fill the oppo shaped hole in my heart, but it does a lot of things right.

Right now I'm not loving the inability to add header text, which DT does have. Also the image embedding is similarly limited to DT. Also also either you can't schedule a post or I am too stupid to figure that part out...

But I love the ability to add tags! And bold and strikeout and all the other text controls.

I have a sinking feeling we're going to land on "both" being the solution... which is fine I guess?

But, in case I haven't said it recently, I really appreciate all the migration efforts people are doing. No matter where we end up, I'm glad I am part of something people are working this hard to preserve.

[jminer]

@AkioOhtori It’s not a perfect solution, it feels more like home than DT to me, but it is definitely no Kinja.

The editor takes html tags so you can probably go nuts with formatting if you want to tinker. No post scheduling at the moment - that’s definitely a big gap. On the other end though I do like the fact that starting a post doesn’t time stamp it then so you have to edit it later when you finish it.

There are two options on image embedding - either link to an offsite published site or copy/paste into the editor and there’s also an upload icon.

You may be right about both solutions particularly in the interim, there are talks about what a forever home looks like though.

At any rate - welcome and let me know thoughts. It’s constantly changing right now as it’s evolving.

[AkioOhtori]

@jminer Yeah it is amazing how far this all has come in such a short amount of time. I don't think post scheduling is a big issue, just a nice to have. Here is definitely closer to "home" than DT and I appreciate that. I'm not used to the layout and different layers, but I suspect (hope?) that'll come with time. I did try some HTML formatting and it didn't go well. What is the backend on this?

For me to be comfortable here, I think my big two sticking point are sustainability and exposure.

The former, both current frontrunners are going to struggle with. For this site (and I know a lot of this info isn't available right now) I'd want to know more about the backend and the structures put in place so if one person gets hit by a bus, so to speak, or decides to go follow a flock of seagulls, so to speak, we're not boned.... so to speak haha. But, again, I know assume that is stuff that is in flux right now, but, eventually, I'd want to know all about it. DT has its own issues with sustainability, of course, so... heh.

The latter... well the exposure on DT is kind of intoxicating. My road trip test post on DT currently has 2x the views the identical 3 year old Oppo post has. A consistent frustration of mine with Oppo is great posts get buried or don't get clicked on with no real rhyme or reason. (Not that you can really trust Kinja stats anyway.) I'd spend days drafting a post only to have it get less than 150 views and like... two comments. Unclear if here will be the same, but I'm guessing with a smaller, more insular community it seems more likely than not. Then again the small, polite community on Oppo is why I like it. Opening it up to the greater community of DriveTribe may suck!

Wow... this comment ended up much longer than I'd intended. I guess I'll close with the familiar refrain of: I really appreciate all of the effort you and everyone else is putting in and am sure we'll end up better for it.

[Chariotoflove]

@jminer said in Test Post and musings:... it feels more like home...but it is definitely no Kinja.

LMAO to read these words. I never thought in all my days I'd see someone type this.

[jminer]

@AkioOhtori You're laying out the struggle perfectly, the attention from DT is very tempting, just like other socials but it also feels hollow (to me) instead of the frequent meaningful conversations we have on Oppo.

Nickel tour of infrastructure right now (likely will change if this stays permanent). AWS T2.xlarge EC2 server behind an elastic IP running Ubuntu (forget whether 18 or 20), forum runs on nodebb which is a node.js front end with a Mongo DB and an nginx web server.

If we keep growing I'll split off Mongo onto a separate server and toss in a couple application load balancers and some auto-scaling groups to handle the load and server failures. Also image hosting will be punted from in-OS storage to S3 storage.

I do not know what the future holds, I started this late Friday as there were a fair bit of folks not in love with DT so I figured I'd give this a try.

Ultimately I think we'll end up with a more blog-like front end (wordpress or ghost) maybe with a robust commenting solution (diqsus or this) and user forum. I'd love to be able to showcase some of the longer form work like you journies or ttyymmnn's this day in aviation history and so on. That's definitely something that will take longer than the week we had here though. It'll also require a larger cash outlay, time investment and guidance which we don't have any of now.

[jminer]

@chariotoflove If anything this week has taught me, it's that despits the flaws Kinja was a pretty unique platform that worked well for what we did with it.

[Chariotoflove]

@jminer said in Test Post and musings:

@chariotoflove If anything this week has taught me, it's that despits the flaws Kinja was a pretty unique platform that worked well for what we did with it.

For sure!

[CarsOfFortLangley]

@akioohtori I mean, if it's just two websites...that's not bad for fragmentation. And, it isn't like visiting a website is arduous. I visit so many during the day!

[AkioOhtori]

@carsoffortlangley For sure!

[BritsnSwedes was MINIGTI]

@akioohtori SAASSAAB!