9 ms·
The Bluesky firehose viewed in the style of a Windows XP screensaver
- pinerd3 2y agoThis is SO cool I love it. Feels like I'm reading snippets from a million people's diaries one after another. Humbling!
- davidshuer6 2y ago[dead]
- consumer451 2y agohttps://github.com/theosanderson/firehose 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.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoYeah I was looking into the firehose as a potential way to source to discover new domains for my search engine. Even though it didn't pan out, I really appreciate how accessible the data is.
- morkalork 2y agoWhy didn't it work out?
- marginalia_nu 2y agoI decided agains it because it had an incredibly bad signal to noise ratio. Almost all links I saw were either to big websites like newspapers, patreon, onlyfans; or behind url shorteners. Dunno, I may explore it further down the line, but for now the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dools 2y agoI created a website like 10 years ago called birdmine that indexed every link you or one of your followers shared on Twitter, in a Solr search engine so you could search stuff that had been curated to an extent. It was pretty cool, I think I’m the only person that ever used it though.
- djbusby 2y agoBSky could use a better search, or a better curation of feeds. I'm certain there is more room in the discovery play.
- mariusor 2y agoI might have asked this before, but did you look at adding this type of ingestion for ActivityPub?
- marginalia_nu 2y agoBriefly, but I've come to learn there's a contingent of aggressively search-engine hostile people that has made a home on the fediverse. The federated nature of it makes it somewhat tricky to untangle the search engine friendly people from the hostile. I don't need the inevitable DDOS:es and death threats you get when upsetting a clique of mentally ill people online.
- mariusor 2y agoYou're right, I forgot about the backlash that this type of efforts got from people that don't understand the technology and just make assumptions about element visibility in the network, though maybe calling them mentally ill is a bit much.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoThe sorts threatening physical violence almost certainly are. But it's a minority to be sure.
- blitzar 2y agoA long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... there was a twitter firehose and people loved how the open nature of twitter is allowing people to hack things ...
- z3ncyberpunk 2y agoAnd then they decided to not-so-openly collaborate with government regimes who sought multiple times to implement a ministry of truth and censor everyone they didn't like. So now we have to settle for poor decision making.
- jauntywundrkind 2y agoAlso 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://nightsky.hctr.dev/ https://bsky.app/profile/hctr.dev/post/3lb3ywnxac22n https://bsky.app/profile/hctr.dev/post/3lb3ywnxac22n
- billylo 2y agoLove it! I seriously want to use it as a background for my server. (any chance to publish a version with a configurable speed?)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- theoretically23 2y ago(Creator here), sure I just added something so you can play with the URL: https://firehose3d.theo.io/?speed=0.9 https://firehose3d.theo.io/?speed=0.9 (but if you slow the movement down too much there will just be way too much content because it's real time) For people on slow machines you can also reduce the number of messages with e.g. https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.7 https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.7
- billylo 2y agoPerfect. Thanks!
- mbil 2y agoThis crashes my Safari browser on iOS.
- theoretically23 2y agoYes, best in Chrome I'm afraid
- tsumnia 2y agoFirefox ran it, but very broken.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 2y agoWeird, for me it worked great on mobile Firefox
- yazzku 2y ago"Works" on Firefox if you can stomach 300-400ms pauses every 2 seconds. Edit: I just profiled it and it spends 42% of exclusive time in texImage2D. It would be better to allocate a set of textures up front and then use glTexSubImage2D to update their contents. glTexImage2D allocates a new texture every time.
- theoretically23 2y agoThanks - should be better now hopefully on Firefox
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoStill very stuttery before crashing in Safari on iOS on my iPad :/
- brookst 2y ago
- esperent 2y agoThis pretty quickly crashed my tab, using Chrome on Android.
- dicknuckle 2y agoWorks fine on Kiwi Browser on Android, although I'm using a fairly powerful ASUS phone.
- esperent 2y agoI also tried it on Kiwi, using an s21 FE which is a few years old but not exactly a slouch and it crashed after about 10 seconds, same as Chrome.
- zamadatix 2y agoI 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.
- z3ncyberpunk 2y agoBigger is not always better if it just fills up with the same type of people who fled Twitter in the first place. No one wants/needs a second Reddit.
- theoretically23 2y agoThanks - implemented some texture pooling (via LLM). I think the blurriness may [accidentally] help with the retro aesthetic, but I'll try to get that the anisotropy in as an optional parameter.
- Etheryte 2y agoYeah, managing your own memory is a good performance optimization a surprising amount of time when working with large data sets in Javascript. I've seen it used in 3D code, graph problems, etc, and so long as you keep it isolated, it's not too much of a hassle.
- catapart 2y agoThis is fucking bonkers, bro. Love it!
- 999900000999 2y agoCool, but this nearly hard crashed my phone. I'm on a OP12 which is one of the fastest phones you can buy.
- consumer451 2y agoThe creator is here reading the feedback, and committing code as we speak. I wonder how much HN feedback will help. In any case, this is all a fun experiment! update: between when I posted OP and now, the site went from utter jank in FF to 90% smooth on my 7 year old ThinkPad Carbon X1 (5th gen, Intel HD 620) Nice! This is one of the coolest comment->commit experiences that I've ever had!
- petee 2y agoFor a comparison, I'm on a Pixel 8a mid-level device, and with Opera I get fairly smooth frame rates with some stuttering here and there. Maybe something else is running in the background?
- throwaway519 2y ago$100 Helio G85 with 6G RAM runs fine. Fennex browser. Check your OS or browser for problems.
- nektro 2y agocrashed my firefox
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xunil2ycom 2y agoI have no clue what "Bluesky firehose" even means.
- consumer451 2y agoBluesky is a microblogging social network, like Twitter, or Threads. However, Bluesky is the only one with open access to the firehose, aka all the activity. Here is a different, less aesthetically pleasing tool to see it: https://firesky.tv https://firesky.tv
- jeromegv 2y agoMastodon is pretty open as well. Just won’t be the entire firehouse due to the decentralized nature of it.
- consumer451 2y agoI should have included Mastodon in my list, my apologies. Theoretically, it's the most copesthetic project.
- CaptainFever 2y agoThere seems to be some projects that scrape(?) the most popular servers to turn it into a firehose, like this one: https://relay.fedi.buzz/ https://relay.fedi.buzz/
- pfraze 2y agoThe atproto relays are crawling aggregations of independent servers. There’s no reason AP couldn’t accomplish the same if they worked on it
- squigz 2y agoGoogle to the rescue: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose
- infotainment 2y ago
- firecall 2y agoWarning: May Cause Seizures
- JKCalhoun 2y agoSeeing 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.
- theoretically23 2y ago(Here's a version without that problem: https://firehose3d.theo.io/babylonjs.html https://firehose3d.theo.io/babylonjs.html)
- tholman 2y agoCrashes 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.
- consumer451 2y agoFor people experiencing crashes, Theo mentioned that this will likely work: https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.6 https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.6
- djbusby 2y agoI was hoping it was some RegEdit hack to fix driver settings.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- willio58 2y agoIf I understand correctly, the whole point of At-Proto being decentralized is that if bluesky were to shut down we’d still have access to this data. Someone else could create a client for posting and we’d be off to the races. But maybe not?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- valeg 2y agoWhoa!
- jaimex2 2y agoNot sure about your feeds but I got a lot of moping over Twitter/X.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWhoa, 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.
- TheJoeMan 2y agoThere could be some pessimism or learned hesitancy, but on the other hand perhaps we can just enjoy it while it is here? I thought the same thing about people building businesses on top of ChatGPT, yet they managed to have exits before any rug-pulls.
- smusamashah 2y agoWhich windows screen saver was this exactly? Is it maze?
- nullbyte808 2y agoReally cool! Works smoother in Firefox than Safari
- qingcharles 2y agoThis is trippy as hell on my 40" ultrawide. Love it.
- ProllyInfamous 2y ago43" 16:9... on M2Pro... it's like trying to listen to a group of your closest million friends, shroomed. It's also the first GPU-intensive "struggle" this machine has experienced (i.e. animation is occassionally choppy).
- metadat 2y agoThis is incredible. It's all I ever wanted.
- oksurewhynot 2y agoI would like to know how far through the firehose I have traveled
- 082349872349872 2y agoUse the force to sense how many pixels you've traveled. Then, when you get to the exhaust port, fire the proton torpedoes.
- 2809 2y ago[flagged]
- leonjza 2y agoCurious about this statement. Can you link to any reading I can do to learn more?
- consumer451 2y agoSame here. I just looked up who is behind their Series A lead, and it's not ideal. However, I can't find a moscow connection. In any case, what I would love to know is who has the majority of voting shares, how the PBC relates to that, etc.
- threeseed 2y agoLooking at their investment rounds have seen no Russian investment: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bluesky-514d/company...
- timeon 2y agoIsn't Twitter funded by SA and Russians?
- krjagsh 2y agoSA, yes. The full list is at the bottom of this article. While Russians may hide behind one of the many firms, it does not look like they have anything like a controlling stake: https://fortune.com/2024/08/22/elon-musk-x-twitter-owner-list/ https://fortune.com/2024/08/22/elon-musk-x-twitter-owner-lis...
- timeon 2y ago> anything like a controlling stake Post (now flagged) was not mentioning controlling stake. So I was referring to this: https://www.dw.com/en/what-do-xs-alleged-ties-to-russian-oligarchs-mean-for-musk/a-70088598 https://www.dw.com/en/what-do-xs-alleged-ties-to-russian-oli...
- ulrischa 2y agoI like the possibilities given by the openness of bluesky
- bitwize 2y agoNeeds more Ellie Goulding: https://helloenjoy.com/lights/ https://helloenjoy.com/lights/
- nyanpasu64 2y agoI 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)?
- theoretically23 2y agoHere's a version with that fixed https://firehose3d.theo.io/babylonjs.html https://firehose3d.theo.io/babylonjs.html (will probably replace the current one soon)
- issung 2y agoReminds me of this old website I used to stare at for long periods, found it very relaxing: "Listen to Wikipedia" http://listen.hatnote.com/ http://listen.hatnote.com/
- dang 2y agoRelated: Wikipedia Recent Changes Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649091 - Aug 2022 (36 comments) Listen to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25560953 - Dec 2020 (34 comments) Show HN: A Billboard-like chart for Wikipedia articles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10730695 - Dec 2015 (7 comments) Listen to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9972781 - July 2015 (63 comments) Listen to a melody made by Wikipedia article changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588576 - Nov 2014 (10 comments) Listen to Wikipedia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182576 - Aug 2013 (1 comment) Live map of recent changes to Wikipedia articles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5693189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5693189 - May 2013 (13 comments) Wikipedia Recent Changes (Live) Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5687722 - May 2013 (1 comment) Rcmap: real-time visualization of Wikipedia edits around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5645256 - May 2013 (3 comments)
- issung 2y agoWow all the way back in 2013, I have visited it many times over the last 11 years :)
- 7373737373 2y agoI'm saddened that Wikipedia has still not implemented an (AI) text to speech solution to read articles
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- WithinReason 2y agoYou can increase the texture resolution if you "zoom out" of your browser (ctrl+scrolldown or ctrl+- in Firefox)
- null0pointer 2y agoA 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.
- paulgb 2y agoIt’s worth noting that twitter itself owes a lot of its popularity to its openness in the early days. In the early days there were third-party clients, RSS feeds, XMPP support, etc. You could post from a curl command in a cron job, leading to all kinds of interesting automated feeds. Then they walked it all back in the early 2010s. I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago> I like that Bluesky’s federation model makes it harder for them to do an “open platform” bait-and-switch like Twitter did. Why would it? They can still lock everything down and few Bluesky users will even notice. This is similar to what Twitter did, or what Google Chat did, etc. Compare this to other federation platforms where a server that locks itself down loses access to a huge chunk of the network, once the other servers reciprocate.
- diggan 2y ago> Why would it? Since migrating your personal data was a thing they thought about since day one, migrating to another network than the current one would be way easier than any centralized service and also easier than ActivityPub. Seems there is one piece of the puzzle missing yet ("AppViews") in ATProto to be able to run completely independent, but seems they're currently working on getting that in place now.
- yonders 2y agoIt's a nice visualization, but it reminds me of why I avoid social media. Endless, worthless garbage spewed out into the void.
- globalise83 2y agoThis is also social media.
- Kye 2y agoIt feels like Clippy is about to pop out and kick my butt. The authentic XP experience.
- tkiolp4 2y agoWould be interesting to know how the app is deployed. I see there are some k8s yaml files: does the deployment happen manually (e.g., run kubectl commands inside the cluster)? Is there some sort of pipeline perhaps? (I don’t see any in the repo)
- nemo44x 2y agoThe firehouse will allow the scolds and hall monitors to more easily hunt down the blasphemers and wrong thinkers.
- mouse_ 2y agoweird take
- asacrowflies 2y agoThat seems to the only purpose twitter ever served even before it was "ruined" was social witch hunts and mass mob forming.
- pessimizer 2y ago[flagged]
- Nihilartikel 2y agoThis 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.
- do_not_redeem 2y agoDo you think your idea has any more risk than sites like these: - http://astronaut.io/ http://astronaut.io/ - https://obscuretube.com/ https://obscuretube.com/
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ipython 2y agoAbsolutely 100% yes. Difference is these projects themselves are obscure. Opposed to an official Google branded service that will see significant publicity.
- rightbyte 2y agoReally neat. Feels kinda surrealistic. A bit heavy on my broswer though. Is there a way to run stuff like this as an actual screensaver (on Debian)?
- marifjeren 2y agoI 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/77225acb28985ef9329f857a44cfbd80cc96834e/index.html#L251C1-L253C14 https://github.com/theosanderson/firehose/blob/77225acb28985...
- sandworm101 2y agoOnce upon a time, browsers had a stop button to pause animations. Now im hunting menus for that button so i can pause the firehose.
- 0xEF 2y agoThis is like a visualization of my anxiety. Too much coming in at once to possibly process, so higher order cognitive function just goes welp
- jcpham2 2y agoTotally crashes chrome on iOS - repeatedly in strange ways
- brookst 2y agoThis 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.
- kemmishtree 2y agohttps://bsky.app/profile/karabergkara.bsky.social/post/3lb5ttoxgas2w https://bsky.app/profile/karabergkara.bsky.social/post/3lb5t...
- rishabhd 2y agoThe internet, was supposed to be like this. I used to perceive it like this in its early days. And then it got enshittified.
- zft 2y agoIf you are interested if something usefull can build with atproto firehose, here you go https://www.graphtracks.com https://www.graphtracks.com
- BobbyTables2 2y agoHack the Gibson!
- alexjustin 2y ago[dead]
- phylliswayne 2y ago[dead]
- TeresaBorja 2y ago[dead]
- Kurtcheng 2y ago[dead]
- Bernardbrant28 2y ago[dead]