Canvas -- Lemmy's r/Place -- Happening this weekend!

𝔊𝔦𝔫𝔧𝔲𝔱𝔰𝔲@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 734 points –

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/232185

Hey all,

I’ve got an exciting thing to announce today, Canvas — Lemmy’s r/Place!

We need to get our own traditions over here in the Threadiverse, why not start off with our own r/Place

This weekend, we will open up a canvas to all Lemmy users, each user will be able to place 1 pixel every minute. This event will last 72 hours, starting midnight EST on the 4th and ending at 11:59pm EST on the 6th

Some instances that are joining in:

Join the Lemmy Community !canvas@toast.ooo

Join the Matrix Space #lemmy-canvas:matrix.org

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We need to get our own traditions over here in the Threadiverse, why not start off with another platform's tradition

Have you ever read a single history book? Humans are not very creative. All traditions are copying the tribe next door's tradition with a little twist. That's just how culture works.

The age old tradition of cultural appropriation.

This, plus something is better than nothing! Also nobody's saying we can't do anything else later. Nothing wrong with taking something tried and tested to get the ball rolling

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What does it mean for an instance to “join in”? Can users not participate unless their instance has joined?

Seems like onboarding will be handled by a bot, so I imagine it shouldn't really matter what instance you're using. As for instances that are "Joining in", I think that just refers to Admins for those instances promoting the event.

Place is fun. Glad to see that it’s going to happen here too.

It seems there is a fair number of people wanting to “not copy Reddit.” But it seems they forget that the whole reason they are on Lemmy/Kbin is to find an alternative to Reddit, that basically works like Reddit. The sentiment of “don’t do what Reddit does” should apply only to the shifty stuff Reddit does, like cutting off API access to good developers.

I agree. Place is an awesome idea and its inventor doesn’t even work for reddit anymore. The idea extends beyond Reddit, so why not have a big canvas for lemmy?

As much as a lot of people want to shit on Reddit (myself included), they did do some things right over the years.

If you thought Reddit had a lot of fuck spez spam on place, wait till you see lemmys version.

I'd really prefer if we do our own thing and let Reddit slowly fade into obscurity.

Yeah me too but people are addicted to their corporate masters.

I've been on Reddit for seven years and I still don't know what this r/place even is and why people are talking about it.

it's a live, collaborative art project. On reddit, you'd have hundreds/thousands of people all contributing at once.

you have a blank page, you click on page to place coloured pixel. Wait 5 mins to place another.

One pixel every 5 minutes? That sounds extremely tedious.

It is, but it's the type of thing you pop in every now and then and place a pixel, and look at all the updated art that has occurred in the meantime. Everyone's using the same canvas.

That’s why you have a bot that coordinates with a group of users do it for you, if you want to make something intelligible

It is limited, yes, the pixel you place is one amongst many - you are just one part of the much larger project. That's the fun part

It was an event where one user can change the color of a single pixel at a time, choosing from a predefined color palette. There was a cooldown on how often you were allowed to color a pixel, 5 minutes or something, I don't remember.

It was a fun way for communities to band together and draw pixel art over the course of a week or so. It was fun the first time because it was spontaneous and there weren't very many bots, if any. After that, it was just a competition of who paid for the most bot accounts so they could camp a space to keep a clear picture. Completely lost its draw IMO (no pun intended).

I had tried to participate one or two iterations ago. Each and every single pixel I tried to contribute was immediately turned into a red pixel by a bot. Took all the fun out of it.

The picture was there and it was clear where they were trying to get to, but the red dots completely destroyed it.

I had enough of it after that. It's not worth it having to wait five minutes to place one pixel just to have it instantly undone again.

That’s exciting! Would be interesting to see what kind of people are really here lol

Never understood what was appealing about place and will not be attempting to understand. But if it makes people happy…whatever

I never understood Minecraft until I saw what ppl built in there. Place is (was?) a wonderful display of organized, chaotic and artistic choices and behaviors. Participation is awfully slow but that seems to add to the amazing effects the occur. I always found the anarchistic behaviors interesting, like the void. I helped with rainbow road a bit just to be a part of it, nothing serious though just a couple pixels here and there.

The first iteration was cool for awhile. It came out of nowhere and people spontaneously created art together, battled other groups trying to do the same, chose colors as their flag of war. I had a window open in the background that I would pop in on every ten minutes or so while I worked to try to support a small piece that I liked.

Then people coded bots for it and it got hyper-organized. They announced the next one ahead of time and it absolutely destroyed the soul of the thing. The second and third ones were a fucking joke. Watching the time lapse was embarrassing as immediately the entire canvas was covered with flags and brands. Awful idea to bring here.

I can't really say I am very interested but I think it's like an online dance battle.

Anyone remember canv.as? That thing the 4chan guy tried to make way back?

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with something sort of kind of like Place but not a complete clone.

Hold on I got it, Place but...

three deee

With sound, everybody can choose an instrument and place a note on an orchestral score and OH THE CACOPHONY! MAKE IT STOP!

I imagine it'd sound like this.

Credit where it's due, Reddit was pretty good at coming up with novel ideas for social experiments for a few years (which also drove engagement, not coincidentally).

If I were to come up with Place-but-not, for the fediverse and Lemmy specifically, I would do it like this:

The canvas would start very small and divided into plots, with each plot "owned" by a user. The user who owns a plot can determine the pallete to be used in their plot, can whitelist / blacklist other users on their plot, and has a reduced cooldown on placing pixels inside their plot. They are the admin of their plot, basically, which is to mimic an instance.

When every pixel of the canvas has been covered at least once or a certain amount of time has elapsed, it would expand with new auto-generated plots randomly assigned to users from among those who have placed a pixel. Plots could be regular squares or other irregular shapes. The most inactive plots could be blanked and reassigned to a new owner after a time.

In this way, users would have to work together to make bigger art on the canvas or seek out a spot willing to cooperate with their art. You'd see alliances of plots, users making art around an uncooperative plot, hostile plots get ganged up on, hands-off plot owners allowing anything on their plot, and all sorts of shit like that that makes social experiments like this interesting. You'd likely still need top-tier admin intervention to remove hate symbols and the like.