A new home for the #chiLFT bot
Saturday, January 25, 2025
The lakefront trail status bot is on the web and bluesky alongside twitter now.
The what?
#chiLFT is a community hashtag used to crowdsource trail condition reports for Chicago’s Lakefront Trail. Anyone can contribute by posting with #chiLFT on Bluesky or Twitter. When you post with the hashtag, the bot will:
- repost your status wherever you posted it
- share a link to your post on the other site
- embed your post on the bot’s website
The bot also shares curated posts from r/chibike, the national weather service, and official Park District updates about the trail in all those places.
Check it out at https://chilftbot.streicher.io.
What to post
Active Trans has some good guidelines on their #chiLFT page:
In order to keep this information as useful as possible for trail users, everyone is invited to use the Twitter #chiLFT hashtag to report specific, objective information about the trail. This could include a variety of trail-related news, including ice on the trail, crashes or other incidents, temporary access issues, traffic, and high waves.
A good number of people have new post notifications set up for the bot’s social accounts. Don’t spam the hashtag.
A little history
The hashtag, and a twitter account that would retweet updates, were created by Active Trans in 2011. Here’s the second ever #chiLFT post, from the days of manual retweets and third party image hosting:
RT @brianfmorrissey: Lakefront is unplowed btwn North/Grand. Fun ride this AM: twitpic.com/3pe54o #chiLFT
The web has changed a lot since then.
At some point, the Active Trans LFT account went offline. Toward the end of 2021 I went looking for it because I wanted to get trail status notifications on my phone. When I saw it was gone, I decided to rebuild it. That version of the bot reposted its first status on January 1, 2022.
Twitter is increasingly a difficult place to run a bot and an unpleasant place to spend time. It’s run by a space nazi. The bike community is beginning to move on. I’m not sure what the runners are doing, but as a pain-loving people you might expect them to stick around. My goal with this update is to make #chiLFT a web-first crowdsourcing initiative, accessible wherever the communities that use it are, to keep it alive for the people who rely on it.
Next steps
I’d love your feedback. In the meantime, I’ll be working on:
- an rss feed you can subscribe to on the website
- once the new feeds gain some traction, reconsidering whether I want the bot to continue to run on twitter at all