Hey everyone! Thanks for participating in Canvas. I wanted to make a thread to collect together suggestions people have that can be worked on before the next Canvas.
Feel free to also throw in suggestions for future Events we can build and run for the fediverse.
Ill be collecting suggestions together and making issues for them in the repository for myself or some other contributors to work on (the projects open source so anyones free to contribute! https://git.sc07.company/sc07/canvas Feel free to reach out to me and I can help get you set up with the codebase)
- tuna ( @tuna@discuss.tchncs.de ) 14•4 months ago
On mobile I kept opening the whois pixel by accident when dragging. I often tap and hold to initiate a drag because I’m still looking at the art, but when i drag away and let go, it opens the whois thing. I think if you drag a certain screen-space distance away it should cancel the whois pixel lookup.
The heatmap I found too hard to tell where recent pixels were placed. I think at 100% opacity the “cold” pixels should be dark blue instead of their actual color.
A couple times I placed a dot, realized I actually didn’t want it there and ran out of time to undo, which felt bad having to wait 30s. I wish it was a bit longer.
When you try to place a pixel a few milliseconds too early I feel like it should queue it and wait the few milliseconds for you.
I’m not super sure on the canvas having transparency. Most people treated the canvas as white, not transparent. If you wanted a white-on-white drawing, people will just make an outline.
Maybe a concept worth testing: if you place a pixel next to your own pixels, you get a (slightly) reduced cooldown, that way you get an extra boost when completing your art. (At the same time, I think there is beauty in the canvas being as simple as possible:)
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
I’ve created issues in the issue tracker to keep track of these for next year :)
- Mobile Pixel Whois triggers too easily
- Heatmap colors
- Increase undo cooldown
- Grace period for pixel cooldowns
- No white background
- Idea: adjacent self pixels should receive a slight reduced cooldown
thank you for the suggestions!
- tuna ( @tuna@discuss.tchncs.de ) 2•4 months ago
Happy to participate!
The one thing I wasn’t super sure on was the undo timer… was it really 30 seconds 😅? I thought it was 5-15s, but i didnt really time it. And I’ll be honest, I missed it maybe 3 times, so not much.
Besides just increasing the delay, there’s 2 other thoughts:
- A bigger target takes less time to hit (tho making it bigger might bother some, as it obstructs the canvas)
- Two times I missed were bc I failed to notice my mistake. Maybe some extra visual feedback when you place a pixel could help. For example: when the void made it to my art, I accidentally made a dark gray become black, so it was harder to notice the color change. i was too busy focusing where to place the next pixel
Overall if you feel that the undo time was fine as it was I could easily respect that decision :)
- eco_game ( @eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de ) 2•4 months ago
+1 on the mobile draggging issue
- Gamma ( @GammaGames@beehaw.org ) English13•4 months ago
Thanks for making it open source! I’m curious how complex the authentication stuff was. I didn’t place many pixels but it was fun to peek in and see what changed every once in a while! Would definitely be a fan of more in the future, though I don’t have any ideas
- bstix ( @bstix@feddit.dk ) 9•4 months ago
Okay wild idea for a smaller canvas :
Have the canvas fade out to white a little every hour.
Eventually old pixels would die and people would either have to maintain or draw new stuff. It would make the timelapse more interesting and more animated by default.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
ooo that sounds fun
i’ve created an issue for this so i can keep track of it :)
- db0 ( @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English8•4 months ago
If alts are really discouraged, please take steps to actually prevent them.
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English1•4 months ago
I think a proof of work could work but it would be really bad for battery life. If someone had multiple tabs open there computer would start to crawl which would make the experience awful
- BlueKey ( @BlueKey@kbin.run ) 2•4 months ago
Hard to do, as then one with a slow PC or average phone would have the same experience as one with a very good PC and 10 alts.\ PoW only is effective for large spam / bot campaigns.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English1•4 months ago
I’ll be working on some better moderation tooling for next year’s canvas (+ any other fediverse event) but with the nature of this, the tooling won’t be in the open :/
here’s the issue i created for enabling these external moderation tools
if you have any suggestions (execution or specific checks) feel free to shoot me a DM on matrix
- Reef ( @reef@lemmy.ca ) 7•4 months ago
I started this, and never got started: https://lemmy.ca/c/musicleague
Part of the problem was that musicleague only works with a spotify login, but it could work with a fediverse login!
MusicLeague: https://musicleague.com/user-guide/
- Each league is made up of a certain number of rounds.
- Each round has a musical theme, like ‘covers’ or ‘I want your sax.’
- When the round opens, league players are notified to submit a song that fits the theme.
- When everyone has submitted (or the submission deadline arrives), everyone receives a link to the playlist to listen, consider, and then return to Music League to assign points and add comments to reminisce, toast and maybe a gentle roast.
- Once the votes are in, everyone will be able to see the results, including who submitted what, how everyone voted, and all the comments.
- Points are earned from round to round and accumulate through the entire league until a winner is crowned.
What we can do better:
- fediverse login instead of spotify
- submit from any music service, not just spotify
- multiple playlist options, with a note for when a certain song isn’t on a service
This shouldn’t be an annual event, but rather a perpetual one
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
fediverse-auth (the login system running at auth.fediverse.events) is fully OpenID connect compliant so it should be pretty easy to implement into other projects
Looks really neat though!
The source for that is available on the gitlab https://git.sc07.company/sc07/fediverse-auth
- fubarx ( @fubarx@lemmy.ml ) 6•4 months ago
It would be amazing if parts of it could be animated. Maybe multiple layers of canvases (say, 5 frames, shown over a second). Each with their own images, which could be viewed as a flipbook.
Instead of going for a larger canvas, go for more layers.
Just a thought.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
that’s a cool take on canvas, i like it
i’ve created an issue for it to keep track of it :)
- 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍 ( @sxan@midwest.social ) 5•4 months ago
Is there a history of the changes stored? I’d love to watch an accelerated animation of the creation process.
I did not find a way to simply “view the entire canvas & download a snapshot,” which would be nice.
- eatham 🇭🇲 ( @eatham@aussie.zone ) English6•4 months ago
There are time lapses, and all the data has been released.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
(for completeness as i’m going through all the comments)
there’s a suggestion for canvas snapshots and it should be implemented for next year 👍
- BlueÆther ( @BlueEther@no.lastname.nz ) 5•4 months ago
I’d be keen to run/test a local version, what do I need in the .env.local as a minimum to get up and running?
To get it actually running you need to do more than set up just the env but ive got what I needed to do here
https://share.ategon.dev/u/IzcMWM.md
If you want to allow logging in so you can test the features that get unlocked from that heres some code changes to get it working so you can bypass setting up openid
http://share.ategon.dev/u/W7IODE.md
Client will be up at localhost:5173
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English1•4 months ago
there’s an issue to write instructions on how to setup the environment
the server requires the authentication server to be fediverse-auth with the current implementation, but there’s an issue to add support for other providers
(once the documentation is written i’ll be putting it in #canvas-meta:aftermath.gg to keep people in the loop)
- BlueÆther ( @BlueEther@no.lastname.nz ) 2•4 months ago
Yeah, I figured as much. I put it on the backburner as I was wetting up a selfhosted scratch instance for the girls
- Lvxferre ( @lvxferre@mander.xyz ) 4•4 months ago
[Sorry for the double reply]
The “numbers” template style would be considerably more useful if the palette was itself numbered. At least, while using that style.I’ve seen a lot of people struggling to find the template. I think that it deserves its own button.
The dark mode is amazing. Seriously, I want it for the next years. I don’t think that it needs such a huge button though, when a simple half-black half-white sun icon would do the trick.
On desktop the palette has an awkward shape, as a narrow 32x1 strip that you need to roll back and forth if the window isn’t maximised (fairly often, since people were doing other stuff while placing pixels). It would be great if it was a 4x8 somewhere at the right.
A lot of people (incl. myself) were struggling to tell a few colours apart. Mostly dark grey vs. black vs. navy blue and dark chocolate vs. maroon. So it might be sensible to tweak the palette itself for the next years. But overall their hue distribution was really good, in no moment I thought “damn, I need more colours”.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
thank you for your suggestions! i’ve created issues in the tracker for each one so i can keep track of them :)
- aeharding ( @aeharding@vger.social ) 4•4 months ago
Hi, Voyager dev here, I’d like to see a very small, terse API for clients devs to make a more seamless experience!
The MVP IMO would be a way to automatically log the user in when opening the Canvas, perhaps by
- well known Canvas user handle for client to automatically DM for OTP
- client waits for OTP in DMs
- client adds a query parameter with the user handle and OTP to the URL to open browser, so user is automatically logged in with 0 clicks!
And I could see stuff beyond this. Like an API to know event metadata, docs on how to embed Canvas in app (would be great for engagement)
Anywho simple is best but would be awesome for tighter integration of apps/clients with a documented API!
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
this would actually be very cool
i’ve created an issue for it so i can keep track of it :)
- squirrel ( @squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de ) 4•4 months ago
The event was fun for the first 48 hours - before the expansion. After that it was mostly policing and defending existing art. I would prefer a 48 hour canvas without expansion.
That said, it was fun anyways. Thanks for all your work and thanks to grant for setting everything up and fixing issues on the fly.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
i’ll keep a note of that, a couple people have also suggested alternatives to canvas expansion
i’m glad you enjoyed the event, it was really fun to run (and fix bugs for) :)
- RandomVideos ( @RandomVideos@programming.dev ) 4•4 months ago
A really small canvas with a short time sounds cool
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English4•4 months ago
Or a canvas that grows with random parts becoming read only
- db0 ( @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) English5•4 months ago
Ye this idea I would like to expand on. Start with a normal size canvas and let it run normally for 24h. After 24h, have a new 1px empty line appear on the bottom every 3 minutes or so while the highest 1px line becomes read only. Keep doing this until the event ends.
This will in turn cause a canvas that keeps expanding downwards but previous creation are “locked in” slowly.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
as well as this one, i’ve added it as an issue to keep track of it :)
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
this one also seems neat, added it as an issue to keep track of :)
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English1•4 months ago
added this as an issue to keep track of it :)
sounds like a neat idea
- myusernameis ( @myusernameis@lemmy.ca ) 3•4 months ago
A toggle to show grid lines would be awesome.
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
added this as an issue to keep track of :)
- BlueKey ( @BlueKey@kbin.run ) 3•4 months ago
Maybe replace Googles Captcha with an alternative like hCaptcha.
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English1•4 months ago
Honestly they are both pretty bad for privacy as the way that they work is a black box. At least it isn’t Cloudflare as it constantly thinks I am a bot
- BlueKey ( @BlueKey@kbin.run ) 3•4 months ago
I agree. But at least hCaptchas don’t block you if you use more aggressive privacy-enhancing plugins and they are fun to solve (and don’t require you to find the traffic-light 20 times because your connection is a bit sus.)
And also yes, fuck Cloudflare.
- Smash ( @Smash@lemmy.self-hosted.site ) 3•4 months ago
I often got the “you’ve already placed a pixel of that color there” error, even though I never touched this area. I also couldn’t fix my own pixelart easily because of this.
- u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org) ( @user224@lemmy.sdf.org ) English3•4 months ago
You could get around that bug by choosing a different color and then pressing undo. After that it reverted to the correct color.
- Smash ( @Smash@lemmy.self-hosted.site ) 1•4 months ago
I did, it was still quite annoying. Having the “Undo” is enough and it doesn’t need a warning imo
- grant 🍞 ( @grant@toast.ooo ) English2•4 months ago
i’ve created an issue to track this :)
this error was being sent by the server, so somewhere along the chain your computer got desynced from the pixels the server was aware about