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.
It’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.
> 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.
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.
You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
> You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily
Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.
A 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 ...
Yeah 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.
I 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.
I 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.
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.
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.
Thanks - 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.
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)?
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.
Would 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)
(Creator here), sure I just added something so you can play with the URL: 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 reference, while it does work much better on my old laptop now, on iOS 18.0.1 iPhone 11 Pro Max, it also crashes until I add https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.6
"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.
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.
There 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.
The 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!
For 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?
Bluesky 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:
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.
It’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.
> 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.
> 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.
You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily, and most definitely you could in Google Chat. This did not change things.
> You could still migrate all _your_ data to another service in Twitter quite easily
Yeah? I don't remember being able to migrate from/to Twitter and taking followers/following etc with you without having to ask/request others to do something too.
But I'm guessing that you'll also have to request your followers to use a different AppView if Bluesky did a Twitter.
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.
A 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 ...
Yeah 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.
I might have asked this before, but did you look at adding this type of ingestion for ActivityPub?
Why didn't it work out?
I 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.
I 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.
BSky could use a better search, or a better curation of feeds. I'm certain there is more room in the discovery play.
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.
For people experiencing crashes, Theo mentioned that this will likely work: https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.6
I was hoping it was some RegEdit hack to fix driver settings.
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:
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.Thanks - 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.
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/
Related:
Wikipedia Recent Changes Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32649091 - Aug 2022 (36 comments)
Listen to Wikipedia - 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 - Dec 2015 (7 comments)
Listen to Wikipedia - 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 - Nov 2014 (10 comments)
Listen to Wikipedia - 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 - May 2013 (13 comments)
Wikipedia Recent Changes (Live) Map - 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 - May 2013 (3 comments)
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)?
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.
Would 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)
This is SO cool I love it. Feels like I'm reading snippets from a million people's diaries one after another. Humbling!
It feels like Clippy is about to pop out and kick my butt. The authentic XP experience.
Love it! I seriously want to use it as a background for my server.
(any chance to publish a version with a configurable speed?)
(Creator here), sure I just added something so you can play with the URL: 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
Perfect. Thanks!
This crashes my Safari browser on iOS.
For reference, while it does work much better on my old laptop now, on iOS 18.0.1 iPhone 11 Pro Max, it also crashes until I add https://firehose3d.theo.io/?discardFrac=0.6
Firefox ran it, but very broken.
It’s seems to work fir me ok on 18.1
"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.
Thanks - should be better now hopefully on Firefox
Still very stuttery before crashing in Safari on iOS on my iPad :/
Yes, best in Chrome I'm afraid
According to the title, perhaps try IE6 on XP ;)
You can increase the texture resolution if you "zoom out" of your browser (ctrl+scrolldown or ctrl+- in Firefox)
It's a nice visualization, but it reminds me of why I avoid social media. Endless, worthless garbage spewed out into the void.
I like the possibilities given by the openness of bluesky
Which windows screen saver was this exactly? Is it maze?
I think they just mean feelings of early OpenGL (was that what it was?)
It appears to have elements of '3D Maze' and 'Flying Windows' (Windows 3.1).
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.
There 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.
Cool, but this nearly hard crashed my phone. I'm on a OP12 which is one of the fastest phones you can buy.
The 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!
$100 Helio G85 with 6G RAM runs fine. Fennex browser.
Check your OS or browser for problems.
For 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?
This is trippy as hell on my 40" ultrawide. Love it.
This is incredible. It's all I ever wanted.
Really cool! Works smoother in Firefox than Safari
I have no clue what "Bluesky firehose" even means.
Bluesky 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
Mastodon is pretty open as well. Just won’t be the entire firehouse due to the decentralized nature of it.
There seems to be some projects that scrape(?) the most popular servers to turn it into a firehose, like this one: https://relay.fedi.buzz/
I should have included Mastodon in my list, my apologies. Theoretically, it's the most copesthetic project.
Bluesky == A particular Twitter alternative
Firehose == The raw live feed of all new posts from all users
Google to the rescue: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose
This pretty quickly crashed my tab, using Chrome on Android.
Works fine on Kiwi Browser on Android, although I'm using a fairly powerful ASUS phone.
I 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.
Needs more Ellie Goulding: https://helloenjoy.com/lights/
Warning: May Cause Seizures
I would like to know how far through the firehose I have traveled
Use the force to sense how many pixels you've traveled.
Then, when you get to the exhaust port, fire the proton torpedoes.
Whoa!
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
crashed my firefox
This is fucking bonkers, bro.
Love it!
Not sure about your feeds but I got a lot of moping over Twitter/X.