I just finished a proof of concept web app that emulates the same concept introduced by reddit place app: a shared pixel board.

Front-End: Flutter

Back-End: FastAPI, Uvicorn, SQLite, Pillow

Here you can try the beta

App Usage: Zoom In and Out the view, touch a pixel to bring up a color palette, select a color and voila, pixel’s color has been changed!

Color palette menu only works if zoomed in more than 50% of the image

Front End design is a two layer view, background layer is loaded with a PNG of the pixel board, new changes are drawn over in the forebackground using canvas

This decision was to optimize bandwidth consumption,the grid is 1000x1000, that gives us 1 million pixels, sending the current grid as a PNG file weight 1.9mbs, which is better than sending a gzip json that weights 4.4mbs for coordinates and colors.

Also, flutter app design has to be imperative, that means, the view is going to be refreshed many times per second, if device screen can run 60fps, the view is going to be refresed 60 times.

Rendering the whole view painting 1 million pixels on canvas takes about 2 to 4 seconds, rekt, but loading a png is really fast.

I also implemented websockets so users can see live changes

webserver refreshes PNG file every 2 minutes.

Im open to suggestions, i will upload the code once a do some cleaning and do proper documentation.

    • Tibert@compuverse.uk
      19·
      9 months ago

      It’s way too big for this little amount of people, and somehow I stumbled on a porn drawing…

      • Lvxferre@lemmy.ml
        6·
        9 months ago

        I was almost complaining about nationalists as usual spamming flags, but then I stumbled upon chibi Eris, Sylphy and Roxy and now this is the best thing ever.

      • Stovetop@lemmy.world
        41·
        9 months ago

        What the fuck why is it so big? I scrolled for 10 minutes and gave up on trying to reach the end.

        The beauty of the original /r/place was precisely because it was a limited canvas, and communities would cooperate or compete for space, with the output being essentially a visual representation of Reddit as a whole.

  • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    There’s already lots of digital canvases all over the internet. Many of them aren’t connected to anything like reddit and exist independently.

    I’m going to say the same thing I said the last time this was brought up and failed miserably as an event.

    We should be creating our own culture, not trying to recreate the absolute dogshit culture of reddit by ripping off their half-assed ideas that were only used to generate engagement.

    We don’t need engagement other than for talking with each other. Reddit needed engagement because they’ve been chasing an IPO for a decade and use things like /r/place to try to keep the site seeming like its active and that they can sell data to make money.

    Reddit never created Place for the users of Reddit. They created it to game metrics and make the site seem more active.

    So, why are we copying things that were created to increase engagement but not increase the quality of the site?

    My vote is just don’t copy them. Make our own culture. Make your own, interesting, creative idea and share it with the community. Don’t rip off shitty attempts at generating “user engagement” and pushing up that mDAU (monetizable daily active users). Lemmy doesn’t need increase mDAU because they’re not trying to monetize anyone.

      • Hot Saucerman@lemmy.mlEnglish
        18·
        9 months ago

        It’s absolutely a nice exercise for yourself, and I’m sure you learned a lot of good skills along the way. Just because a project doesn’t become a big thing doesn’t mean it wasn’t a useful stepping stone for your skillset.

        The thing is, I suspect with such skills, you’re capable of creating something unique, interesting, and more vibrant than a copy of what reddit did. I do hope you do.