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)
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:)
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:
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 :)
First: Ta k you so much to grant and everyone else who made this project possible. I had a lot of fun, i think the problems made it even more sympathic.
One suggestion: maybe after expansion, the final canvas could be a 16:9 Format. This way its easier to find a frame for those who want to print it out. But maybe 2:1 like the actual canvas is fine too.
Have the cooldown time vary incrementally across the canvas—so there’s a “hot” end where people can make things quickly (and get overwritten quickly), and a “cool” end where designs take longer to draw but are more permanent.
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
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.
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 :/
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
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
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.
[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".
The matrix homeserver that was being used was in the same VM as the rest of my fediverse services, which all of them got hammered when the event started
Before next years event (or any other event) I am going to be getting a dedicated server for all of my fediverse services to prevent this
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
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.)
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
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)
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.
I personally think the whois pixel function should also show the exact coordinates of the pixel, to make it easier to find the exact spot for templates.
Unless I missed something, the only way of doing it now was using the coordinates in the bottom left and then working from there.
That’s just a minor gripe anyway, the whole thing was great, thanks for organizing it!
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.
One another game suggestion: The Turing Test, reversed.
Using LLM API, make people:
Ask one thing and spot a human answering them;
Answer one question and make another human believe they are an LLM.
Only these two rounds (or a text box + checkbox) per a session with a set delay, from a random user or a robot. The goal is counter to the current discourse of noticing LLMs being not humans, but the opposite – people being rewarded for acting like machines and spotting real people in the web poisoned by generative models. I don't know if scores are needed, just complimenting DMs maybe, because mastering tactics to break LLMs destroys the fun.
Besides only English input for the simplicity and a stop-list of words, it needs a balancing system that mixes fake and real inputs to cause no LLM-only hours across all timezones. To make it more interesting, there should be some additional prompts to LLM, like 'answer like an old lady' or 'answer like a nerd' to make LLM seem more humane.
Theming it after spies, zombies, whatever may help.
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.
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.
i've created an issue for the lower cooldowns for smaller instances
sounds like a neat idea imo :)
and for the second suggestion, i'd like to avoid imposing restrictions on new accounts as Canvas has brought a lot of people to the fediverse and i wouldn't want to hamper their contributions because they just found out about it
Great idea we can organize that between our instance instead of waiting for the next year. :D
I quickly drafted some rules :
the competitive instance chose together a subject
the pixel art must be original and not copy-pasted from web. we don't use a template : hosted and template desactivated.each instance will have their private layer. Once the event is over, our draw will be revealed.
2-3 day to draw and send the result
1 week for voting
I love drawing, i'm quite good at it, except perspective :)
Not suggesting any big things here... All I propose is to have the options for toggling the canvas overlays (empty canvas, heat, template) directly within the canvas editing screen instead of putting it in the sidebar, kinda like Google Maps. I think the sidebar version would be preferred in mobiles, so you could make this desktop only.
Alternatively, you could allow the user to place pixels on the canvas even while the sidebar is opened, like the way it was for the first 48 hours of the event. Also ensure the right side of the color palette is not hidden by the sidebar.
I think it would be good to get some privacy and security people to work on the software. I think bots and duplicate accounts are a big issue but maybe you could try implementing some sort of new tech to solve it.
Overall it was a great experience. I just got annoyed at the Australians
I do not like the idea of using IPs for that either, but since it's only for the timing instead of locking people out of the service, it's less of a concern.
And as db0 said IPs are far from optimal but they're the best thing that "we" [actually the devs] have available. If you have some alternative way to discourage simultaneous multi-accounting, by all means, suggest it here.
That's the closest thing we have though. The alternative is just people using alts, and at that point might as well not have limits. There can be ways to add exceptions if needed.
If you undo the changes dome by a bot it could cause chaos. It is better to let users know it needs to be fixed.
It could cause chaos if done poorly, indeed. But I think that there are ways to minimise this chaos.
One of them would be that reverted pixels are marked as "reverted by the admins", and that appears in an overlay similar to the heatmap.
Also you could do some sort of proof of work to make it unfeasible to have a bunch of alts.
Like in cryptography? I like this idea. Perhaps it could be used when there's a reasonable possibility that two accounts are from the same user; for example same IP, or same username but different instance, etc.
there's an issue to add support for undoing pixels with bans, but that would mainly get used in very bad circumstances and wouldn't be the default
as others have mentioned, there's not going to be anything that automatically does actions against IPs, instead opting for a flag that moderations can look into further
i've also mentioned somewhere else in the thread, but i wouldn't want to punish new accounts as, especially this year, it brings new people to the Fediverse and i don't want to hamper the growth of that :) (it also isn't very possible to get a reliable creation date of new accounts because of how the fediverse is designed)
An extended undo functionality would have been handy sometimes. Like, having an eraser that would revert any pixel I have placed myself (and that is still visible) to what it was before while adding one to my pixel store until that is filled. That way I would be able to move or correct things without having to wait (possibly twice as long) for the counter.
i suggested two additional changes in the issue as a comment, i'll copy them here for completeness:
only allow this to happen if the surrounding area also hasn't been interacted by anyone else (maybe like a 5x5 around the pixel) to be undone by the eraser
only works for pixels placed within the last 5 minutes
only allow this to happen if the surrounding area also hasn’t been interacted by anyone else (maybe like a 5x5 around the pixel) to be undone by the eraser
What's the reasoning for this? One of my use cases would have been that I had started to draw something then realised that someone else was drawing next to me, so I'd wish I could have a way to quickly move my thing out of the way. Another one was with a collaboration on a template and in the end trying some adjustments because the template was unsharp. Which was essentially overdrawing other people's pixels just to see how it looks, then perhaps reverting some of those.
I would suggest a small countdown to the end of the event on the place where the pixels count and coordinates belong (circled below), only displaying during the event.
Taking the risk to make myself unpopular but here is a wish from the heart.
Discourage/ban all nationalism. Especially flags.
Reasons:
Nation-states and country borders are a fairly recent invention in history. In this time and age, it's quite counter-intuitive to still keep identifying oneself with (or get emotionally attached to) such divisive concepts that have been devised by those who govern. Especially in a game like this where collaboration is encouraged regardless of anyone's location or belief, we should not get counter-productive over flags and the politics associated with them, or get to argue wether flags represent government entities or the people (they are usually owned by the former, just to say).
Further, I find flags (and also logos) are just so utterly uncreative things to draw. To me, it just shows how societies are still immature; false attachment to the divisive and competitive concepts they were raised to believe in, to the benefit of those who profit from divisiveness and competitiveness. Therefore, please consider a ban on all flags and instead encourage "real" artwork (especially original one).
e: For those who still want to display some honorary mention of their ethnicity/people/heritage, there is likely plenty of symbolism available which may suit their case much better than a symbol of nationalism.