Have you ever wanted to see what everyone is posting on social media in 3D? Now you can! Someone made an old Windows screensaver-style visualization of everything that is posted on Bluesky.
You can check it via the URL (Warning: it's all text posts, uncensored, so view at your discretion; and it has a memory leak so it might crash your web browser if you leave it open):
How It Works
This 3D firehose visualization seems to have been developed developed by Theo Sanderson [theo.io], as he announced the project on his Bluesky account on 2024-11-161.
Its source code was made available on Github:
We can tell from the source code that all this app does is connect to a public Bluesky endpoint using web sockets (wss://jetstream2.us-east.bsky.network/subscribe?wantedCollections=app.bsky.feed.post) and dispatch the data to clients connected to the server.
In other words, all the data you see on the visualization was just pulled straight from Bluesky's servers by the server ran by Theo, and then Theo's server makes it appear on your web browser.
This speaks a lot about how open Bluesky is (currently). Everyone can just take all posts and do whatever they want with it.
Because there are so many posts being posted all the time, this huge stream of data is called a "firehose" by Bluesky's technical documentation2. That's why the subdomain of the website is "firehose3d," because it's a 3D visualization of the Bluesky's "firehose."
Revisions
2024-11-19: I had to change the image because the screenshot I took contained a bad word. For the record, I took several screenshots, but there is always something bad written somewhere.
References
- https://bsky.app/profile/theo.io/post/3lb3tgwwln22s (accessed 2024-11-18) ↩︎
- https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/firehose (accessed 2024-11-18) ↩︎
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