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The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver

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A lot of commenters here are having their minds blown by this. And while I also love this I get the sense that many others here are maybe too young to remember that this kind of open access to data used to exist for lots websites. It inspired companion sites and loads of creativity. I find it tragic really, what the internet has become. I hope federated, and even more-so p2p, protocols take significant foothold on the internet and help revive this spirit of the web. The corpo-web is so fucking boring.

1 year agoby null0pointer

https://github.com/theosanderson/firehose

I just love that the open nature of Bsky is allowing people to hack things like this.

Now that their growth is crazy, let's hope that the work they did on the protocol and corp structure keeps it this way.

1 year agoby consumer451

Crashes like a Windows ME screensaver. Jokes aside, it's very fun to see open firehose access like this. I seem to recall that Dorsey had said that twitter limiting their api access was a mistake, hope we can keep this going.

1 year agoby tholman

I absolutely love these firehose projects. So much fun. Makes me hope Bluesky gets 10x bigger soon :D.

If you add the following line just prior to the return in createTextTexture() the blurriness goes away:

  texture.anisotropy = renderer.capabilities.getMaxAnisotropy();

The perf could probably be largely solved with reusing texture objects as a pool instead of creating then destroying them as needed. I'm too lazy for that though :p.

1 year agoby zamadatix

This is cool! A long time ago I wanted to make something a little like this for my 20% project at Google/YouTube - a page that rained thumbnails of uploaded videos as soon as they became available.

Unfortunately, the idea was nixed since it had a pretty high chance of exposing ugly stuff that would otherwise have been lost in obscurity and never seen.

1 year agoby Nihilartikel

Reminds me of this old website I used to stare at for long periods, found it very relaxing: "Listen to Wikipedia" http://listen.hatnote.com/

1 year agoby issung

I noticed that for messages facing the camera, ones further away from the screen occlude ones closer to the screen. I assume there's an alpha layering/rendering order error going on (assuming no order-independent transparency)?

1 year agoby nyanpasu64

Seeing some depth-sorting issues with the text on Safari (macOS). Some distant head-on text (not on the sides of the "tunnel") is being drawn over nearer head-on text. Also, sometimes top of text is being clipped a bit.

Very cool though.

1 year agoby JKCalhoun

This is SO cool I love it. Feels like I'm reading snippets from a million people's diaries one after another. Humbling!

1 year agoby pinerd3

This crashes my Safari browser on iOS.

1 year agoby mbil

This is like a visualization of my anxiety. Too much coming in at once to possibly process, so higher order cognitive function just goes welp

1 year agoby 0xEF

Love it! I seriously want to use it as a background for my server.

(any chance to publish a version with a configurable speed?)

1 year agoby billylo

Also just saw this project, which is a little night sky scene where stars are posts. No real interactivity but fun to see the playing around! https://nightsky.hctr.dev/ https://bsky.app/profile/hctr.dev/post/3lb3ywnxac22n

1 year agoby jauntywundrkind

Whoa, Johnny Mnemonic (1995) calling.

Also, these experiments are good fun, anytime there's a plethora of data available to play with it's a good time.... but anyone else get the weird sense of having been here before? Early Twitter days lots of this kind of thing was going on too with all the tweet data. Until they weren't. When everyone at Twitter woke up and realized it wasn't sustainable financially and technically to keep open firehoses out there. And then the API limits started creeping in and never really stopped. Just saying, we've been here and it's hard to see it playing out a different way even with ATProto's sorta decentralized whatever future.

1 year agoby ChrisArchitect

This is really cool, and within the first 5 seconds gave me a phrase that will be stuck in my head for a long time: arrogance is not a substitute for intelligence, Sebastian. IDK who Sebastian is, but I will be sure to let him know if ever I meet him.

1 year agoby brookst

I was like.. "Why do so many of the non-wall posts seem to have fire emojis in them?"

Turns out:

if (text.includes('fire-emoji') || wall > 3) { wall = -1; }

It's funny how palpable this snippet is while looking at the firehose.

https://github.com/theosanderson/firehose/blob/77225acb28985...

1 year agoby marifjeren

I like the possibilities given by the openness of bluesky

1 year agoby ulrischa

You can increase the texture resolution if you "zoom out" of your browser (ctrl+scrolldown or ctrl+- in Firefox)