Exploring The ShlinkedIn Tech Stack
It’s like LinkedIn, but for s***posting
There is a satirical, open source social media site called ShlinkedIn that was created to make fun of LinkedIn; I first heard about it on the Tech Team Weekly Podcast, and it also was once featured on the front page of HackerNews. According to an email from the creator, it has thousands of users.
You can write a ShlinkedIn post, and you can react to other people with emojis; the emojis are incomprehensible and meaningless, and each user has the ability to react to anything as many times as they want. There is another feature that allows users to decorate their own posts with emojis in a seemingly random pattern. You know those posts on LinkedIn, where people put the 💯 emoji after every sentence, followed by #hustle and then some picture at the bottom of anything? ShlinkedIn tries to do that automatically.
I tried the “clap insertion” button, but it was a little random even by my standards. After inserting claps, control z did not undo the operation — this was kind of annoying, as there was no easy way to get rid of them after. So I filed an issue.
The Tech Stack
ShlinkedIn uses Elixir/Phoenix, Tailwind, and Postgres. They have their procedure documented here. I installed some dependencies and got the thing running locally.
I think the most interesting thing here is the use of Elixir. When I watched their HoneyPot documentary, I expected them to focus on functional programming; instead, their creator spent about 15 minutes arguing for Elixir’s excellent scalability. The documentary also briefly featured the creator of Phoenix, who characterized it as “a batteries included framework for the platform.”
I also watched “Elixir in 100 seconds,” which I thought was a little more useful.
I have to be careful what I write next, since I learned about Elixir very recently — I checked Medium for relevant articles and found even more people talking about its efficiency and scalability, but what I did not find was an actual comparison of how it performed, relative to the alternatives. This is an article by the CTO of Discord about how they scaled with Elixir. This is a…slightly click-baity article about why Elixir is great. I don’t think Medium is the best resource for tech content because anyone can write and tech publications are pretty loose with what they accept, but one thing I do like about Medium is the comment sections. You can probably learn more reading Medium contents than you can reading actual articles.
Last, but certainly not least, above is the video that ShlinkedIn was essentially built on. I watched it, but I didn’t get it at all. Speaking of changing the subject…
If you have Educative, here is the Educative page about Elixir. As expected, it focuses a lot more than the documentary had on functional programming. It argues that functional programming, which is an alternative to imperative programming, represents a better way to handle situations in which two processes try to modify the same resource simultaneously. Imperative languages have locking mechanisms, but functional programming languages provide a better solution.
And the better solution is…I don’t know yet. I didn’t get that far in the Educative page.
Markup
Here’s the source. It’s in a leex file auto-generated by Phoenix.
I haven’t done much yet, other than download dependencies and get it running locally, but this page could be a next good place.
Closing Thoughts
My personal goal in ShlinkedIn is to insert customized lore. For example, the most popular account is called Office Spider — Office Spider is essentially the villain of the website, often claiming to have murdered or mind controlled every other user on the site. Why not make ShlinkedIn serialized? My favorite part of The Onion was when it had its own story…like a long-running series it did in which Mattis got fed up with the Obama administration and simply decided to take his army and conquer the government.
I think the blog is pretty great. In fact, I think their blog could actually make a lot of money if they had put it on Medium. But unlike Medium, there are a few thins that make their site interesting. Instead of using data harvesting or putting the majority of content behind a paywall, they decided to make a paid tier.
Oh, well I guess that’s actually similar to Medium.
Lastly, ShlinkedIn is interesting because it’s a window into the Elixir community. They have thousands of users and maybe just…I don’t know…100 daily active users? But it’s not just a proof of concept now. They have an actual, popular website that is still, if you look at their GitHub insights, mostly held up by a single developer.
Imagine the ShlinkPoints I will get if I contribute to it.
