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Canvas @toast.ooo

1y ago

Suggestions for Canvas 2024 (or any future events)

Post every suggestion as a separate comment to allow for people to vote & comment on each suggestion

101 comments

Make people aware of it?? I’m on lemmy all day and filtering by all and local and saw like two passing references to this.
- Definitely contact bigger instance admins and get a sticky post going before/during the events
  
  Yeah p.d admin here. I only found out about the event when someone in my instance made a comment referencing it when it was underway.
  Getting contacts with admins of various instances ready to give them information as new events roll around is going to be key for growing participants. If people want I can set up a matrix chat for showing off and giving info for future lemmy events and then that can be centralized into there instead of needing to do separate dms.
  Theres already an instance admin chat but would likely drown out the event posts since there's other topics discussed in there
  
  I sent a couple messages into the Lemmy Instance admins Matrix room, but a lot of instances ignored the posts I made 😅
  lemmy.world was voting internally on when to announce it but the event would've been over before the internal voting concluded they are interested in joining the next event tho 👀
  and to any Lemmy instance admins reading this, join the admin room so you can be aware of the next one :)
- In fediverse@lw there were three separate announcements

Hexagon pixels. (Or weirdly shaped areas to be filled). It would force more creativity and get rid of all designs from previous rounds.
- Weirdly shaped canvas yes, weirdly shaped pixels no, in my opinion. Not until I have a computer with hexagon pixels.
  Doing a theme each year with an appropriately shaped canvas would make each year feel distinct

I'd like the option to place white pixels on virgin white pixels as a form of grief protection.
- same really helped create art, i would like to see this in the future

Run an extra day or two, so everyone gets some weekend and week day? Between shift workers and countries with different weekends, Sat/Sun is still a workday for many.
Thursday-Monday feels good, perhaps with one of the modifications discussed here halfway through.
- I think one issue is that it's no fun to defend your patch for too long. Any future even is likely to have twice as many participants, and anything drawn on the Thursday is likely gone by the Monday without a team to defend it.
  
  That's true, but one thing I liked about r/place was the evolution of designs - for example a massive flag would appear early on, be fought over and then the flag would shrink to a more defensible size and the rest of the flag became a different thing. The time lapse was fascinating because of this.
  The culture here is more cooperative and less troll-y (trollful? trollesque?) so I'd hope/expect to see more collaborative solutions. I know once I'd helped place the fuck cars logo I threw my pixels into helping build unfinished designs or repair existing ones.

Offical user stats after it is done. Maybe a map to see all your placed pixels? Something like that.
- Placement data is available in the official final post, it's up to us to process it into nice maps. I expect that to happen in the coming days.
  
  Ok!

I didn’t see it so sorry if it’s been said, but I would like it if you didn’t have the timer set to 1min when replacing pixels you yourself placed. Thank you, and thank you for doing all of this! It was great!

Better mobile support for templates, like buttons to toggle visibility

Permanent one working with a different model. Like 1 pixel per hour with a fixed drop rate (instead of this “stay and place as fast as you can for best performance”), and you can hold like 36 pixels. So basically you drop a few dozen pixels daily then you're done. After every 100,000 clicks, you move the window 100 pixels to the right, making the leftmost 100 pixels locked forever creating a slowly growing endless immutable banner.
- Infinite German flag? Sounds like an infinite German flag to me
  
  You could mitigate that by adding a limited, rotating color pallet. every time pixels are locked two colors are taken away and two different colors are added. You would always be able to see beforehand when certain colors would be made available, enabling a new level of planing. It also forces creative solutions in defending your art
  That idea would even work standalone without the immutable thing
- Call it Tapestry
  
  Infinitapestry.
- 36 pixels at once would be fine early on when there’s plenty of room and everyone’s doing their own thing, but once it starts to fill up and people start interacting more, other people need time to respond to each pixel.
  Maybe have the number go down over time, or say every time you overwrite an existing pixel it reduces your total stack capacity.
  
  Well my point with 36 pixels is that it would let people use the site in a healthy way (daily) but also allow decent velocity of creation for a slow-developing canvas. The details could be tweaked I just figured "once a day sounds right, no pressure then" and "150 users doing 24 pixels per day would fill a 10th of the canvas (the scroll-right number, 100,000 pixels) in a month. Obviously the numbers could be tweaked depending on activity of the community and the dimensions of the editable canvas, I would just say targeting a good experience for "daily use" is healthy for a permanent site. Because I know my use of this site this weekend was anything but healthy.
  Maybe put the cap at 16 (assuming hourly pixel generation), so you can hit the site twice daily plus a little wiggle room while still reaching peak output. Too often the canvas felt like being the little Dutch boy with the finger in the dike.
  Imho the approach of punishing overwriting with slower regen is the right move - every overwrite pixel you place should add a 1 pixel delay to your pixel generation, so vandalizing (and repairing) takes twice as long as creating.

Depending on whats possible, we could do something similar to R/place and every so often expand the canvas start off with something small eg.512x512 and add another 512 px. along side
- If I remember right, r/place “scaled up” by adding more blank canvas. But it might be more interesting to actually scale up the previous pixels as well, so each iteration is overlaying the previous one with higher detail.
  The end result wouldn’t look as empty, because it would be easier to fill large areas early on.
  
  Interesting idea. That would perhaps wreck a lot of pixel art, but I guess it'd be fine scaled up to 2x2 pixels as you often see it like that anyway.
  If that happens, it should be a surprise - would really throw a spanner in the works and make it a unique event. The more I think about this idea, the more I like it!
  
  Or to make it more realistic, let it expand like the universe. I.e. add extra space between each two pixels: ::: spoiler example
  undefined
  
  w=blank/white, b=non-blank wwwww wbbbw wbbww wwwww -> wwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwww wwbwbwbwww wwwwwwwwww wwbwbwwwww wwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwww
  :::
  Or keep non-blank pixels together, because of pixel bounds.
  
  i like this alot would be really interesting to see.
  
  I like this idea. It also allows filling the previous larger art with more detail. Maybe once 50% of the Virgin pixels are used, it scales up.
- Bad idea , this will result in most active faction taking over space with every expansion
  
  could decrease the amount of time between expansions?

In the future, please do not ignore clear cases of abuse. The logs you published fully support the report reasons given by me in the case of one individual using 6 accounts, all newly made and going straight to grief as their first actions and throughout.
- the pxls backend was spammed by reports done by the software itself (such as "account logged in with ip shared with 2,000 other users" due to a bug related to reverse proxy settings)
  a lot of them we just couldn't get to because the aforementioned bug created 60+ pages of reports with no bulk delete or filter options
  next year's system will be a lot better setup to avoid these types of issues happening tho!
  
  Fair enough, but you were also personally aware of my post pointing out the issue, while @Gurkinator@toast.ooo sent me a message saying they'd check the logs in connection to this again, to which I replied by sending the account names in a PM.
  I'll PM you excerpts from the log that are quite conclusive about it being extremely likely to be the same person based on their activity. Hopefully it will help you be more prepared for something like this in the future.

My son came up with a great idea where we could add a short pop-up note to a pixel or coordinate, perhaps with a viewing expiry time or until the pixel is changed, which would allow for direct communication with other people on the canvas. You could activate the note with a right click of the mouse, for example.
- Maybe also unsolicitedly notify any users who recently placed pixels in a radius around the message.

I think doing it more often than reddit would be cool, not super frequent, maybe twice a year. For now the gui is amazing, and i loved this iteration of canvas!
- I agree, we can just let it be a free for all but maybe someday we'll do around events or something, so there are themes for everyone to try following (like around Christmas, the Linux community does a penguin with a Santa hat)
- Agreed. Commercial sites like reddit like to create false scarcity. Doesn't have to be done all the time, but every 3-6 months might be good.
  Also if it's advertised in advance more people will know about it
  
  This first year it could be done a few more times trying out a lot of the suggestions in this thread. That's the other thing about having this not controlled by a commercial site like you said, we can actually act on new ideas and not just take whatever they decide to give us.
- I disagree. Even people on Reddit thought once a year was too often, twice will definitely lead to burnout.
  We could definitely do it yearly because the community is growing and a lot of people didn’t even know it was happening, but more than that will just turn it into a chore.

Make the event 1-2 days longer (total 4-5 days). 3 days was too short

Also, after its done we can do something like r/place atlas too.
- The data is publicly available for everyone in the thank you post
  I am honestly worn out from running & maintaining the event to write it myself, but I welcome anyone to develop this tool for everyone :)
  If someone decides to make this, just post it here or message me on matrix and I'll pin it on this community!
  
  I'm sure you've got this already from a load of places, but thanks for all the effort in putting this together—it was good fun and it's nice to see we can do events like this on lemmy

The chat wasn't working for me. There is a hotkey ('B') for that but nothing appeared for me and I don't know if something was wonky on my end. Would be nice to be able to easily communicate with other peeps during the event.
- Like xuv said, it was a matter of moderation and how Matrix is much better setup for moderation. I failed to remove the mentions to the chat though, which did confuse people, sorry about that.
  for next years I would like to better connect the on-site chat with Matrix to make chatting a lot easier (and bridging a Discord server to the Matrix space)
  
  for next years I would like to better connect the on-site chat with Matrix
  That would be great!
- There were a couple questions about that here where the admin said they disabled it because they expected people to chat on Matrix instead. I imagine that's easier to moderate etc but it would've definitely been more user friendly to have the built in one.

besides the canvass, we could try something different. I really like that we don't know what would be next year.
- I would love to host other events besides Canvas!
  If anyone has ideas for events they would like to see done, message me on Matrix or shoot me an email
- But what? What other similar events are there?
  
  if possible an ARG or something like the button from reddit.

Have some of the rules (like cooldown time and overdrawing penalty) vary spatially across the canvas. So there could be a “fast/dynamic” corner where it’s easy to interact and compete, and a “slow/static” corner where things stay put more (with intermediate values in between).
This could also be good feedback for future runs, because people could experience a variety of settings on the same canvas and see which they prefer.

Being able to schedule your next 5 or 10 pixels so that they place automatically. 1 minute is so short I had to dedicate my entire time to the canvas for 2 days straight
- Yeah I had canvas running on my watch so I could do other things like working out and texting while I played. Unfortunately the experience on a watch was awful because zooming on a 1.5 inch circular screen was really hard. Sometimes the canvas would desync and so I'd have to reload the screen and rezoom all over again.

Maybe have a short cooldown replacing others' pixels when you have stacked them? Or removing the 30 second longer cooldown for replacing your own?
Edit: Two more suggestions: Ability to place Virgin pixels for your own work if you made a mistake and the undo button has faded/you have already placed another pixel and an Undo key (like "O" or something) to undo after the bar fades.

Different background colour so the final result doesn't look as empty
- Yes, I was thinking the same. You could even do a "flags blank" where it starts with flag-sized rectangles of various random colors.
- Open a second phase with a black background.

Bonus pixels for N pixel streak

what about a canvas that is online for way longer, like a couple of weeks, BUT it is read only except during peak user times, and/or the weekend.
give more time for attention and hype to build up, while still restricting the time people have to place pixels. it would also give people who want to place as many pixels as possible and make bigger projects have time to go outside and touch grass, as well as use the 6/6 pixel stacking.

Maybe all of Lemmy could play a game like chess, pokemon, etc. Like twitch plays videos.

Don’t end till there are no more virgin pixels.
- What about designs that contain white?
  
  You paint them white properly so they no longer show up as as virgin pixels.

I wonder if making the colours partially transparent could work as an interesting / fun twist?

Easier login functionality. I never got in for some reason, after inputting the code I received to get in. Tried multiple browsers including firefox and chrome

First of all, thanks for this event. I love things like this.
Then i have an idea for the next canvas. What if the virgin pixels have no cooldown. Only already placed pixels gain more and more cooldown. A bit like on everyonedraw.com. this way the canvas would be full very soon, then the wars begin. I understand that many dont want rivality but i guess there are some who do want. Maybe it could be alternating. Obe year peaceful, one year war.

Smaller canvas, to make it feel less empty and encourage more communication across communities (or competition! >:] )
- Like the others are saying, if more people are planning on participating we won't need a smaller canvas
  Getting instances on board was initially very hard, but thanks to some community members posting it on other communities we were able to get this big
  More info in another comment
- I'm guessing there'll be more people next time so it might not be needed
  
  That's fair, if it's well-advertised by instance admins then it could have like 4x the contributor count.
- I thought it was too big at first, but it meant everyone had a lot of space so turned out about right I think
  
  To some extent, some people also painted more when they saw there was more space. I know I did. If the Canvas had filled up, I'd either have stopped or gotten involved in turf battles if they came up.
- Canvas size, active participants, and total running time are all factors.
  I liked the fact that there was enough room for everyone to get their initial designs down—once that’s out of their systems they can look around and have more spontaneous interaction. Maybe a bit more time would have allowed for more of that.

Maybe some other game at a different time of year. Perhaps some arcade games or something.
Then again, this thread is old
- i should probably create a new thread, but i was thinking about doing that (the other games idea)
  if you have ideas for any you can dm them to me via matrix or discord (grahhnt)

Ban Political Ads
Why?:
Political ads should stay out of the canvas for gods sake, common sense.
Its not just my view but the 5 dudes from the political ad "Volt" aka "Volt Europe" will say "iTs ArT", "LoOk At ThE GaMe LoGoS" - yeah those are FAN ARTS. A political party CANT have FANS, they can have just voters, who want to gain power somewhere in the world, and they use a "neutral" space to advertise their political party. I hope for those guys they get some fat rewards for their ad on the canvas.
Edit: Thanks for the confirmation @ downvoters that this is for good.
- Sounds like you're still salty for at first thinking it was an energy company and getting publicly corrected. You had no clue what Volt was when you first complained about it.
  We have Karl Marx on the canvas, we have the anarchism star, we have info material on climate change and veganism, we literally have legal texts, we have LGBTQ+ statements and flags, not to mention the multitude of national flags and symbols - and you didn't take offense with any of them. The canvas will always, in part, display political stuff. And what we did was just another logo. No slogan, no content, no call to vote a specific way.
  You tried to grief with your 5+ alt accounts, we played fair. At the end our logo came out pretty nicely. And you will just have to live with that.
  
  we have LGBTQ+ statements and flags
  Those can't be political statements because that's just plain existence.
- Hard disagree. I don't like Volt either, and I'd never vote for them, but I must acknowledge that their political views align with the majority of liberal left users. If you'd like them to be gone, you are more then welcome to team up with friends to replace their pixels with better art. That's entire point of the canvas after all, to see what emerges when random groups and people share the same space.
  
  Ok, thought this wasnt a political ad billboard. A (somewhat) neutral space.
- And who should decide if it's a political ad or not? You could count anything as political ad. Of course there are more obvious examples, like the logo of a political party. But there's also symbols of political groups, like LGBTQ flags, free software mascots, free software license logos, the fuckcars banner, and whatnot. Your suggestion is just not feasible.
  
  Its a political ad if there is something political in it. Like for german political partys like cdu logo, fdp logo, afd logo....

101 comments

Ban Political Ads