Cthulahoops

The Pondiverse is a project (site? experiment? social network?) created by Lu for sharing creative coding creations. When it first appeared in my my Mastodon feed I read the instructions and didn't really understand what it was... so I did what I do when I don't understand something. I started to write code. I took a cherry tree generator that I wrote a few years ago, figured out how to add a Pondiverse button and started pushing cherry trees to the feed.

It was very satisfying but there are limited creative possibilities. You can make autumn trees, or push the parameters to the limits and make rainbow blobs, but there are only so many options.

I have more old projects though! I also wrote a Wavefunction Function Collapse implementation a few years back (more writing code to understand things) and now I knew how to add things to the Pondiverse. This one was really fun and people continue to post wonderful creations. Sharing this inspired me to add flood-fill (double-click), customisable palettes (double-click the color selection buttons), and make it work on mobiles.

One intriguing idea around the Pondiverse is that things should be centred on types of creations not tools. This is why I thought it was important that I was adding tools with scope for user creativity. It shouldn't (just?¹) be about showing off the tool creators work, it should be about making tools that can be used to create. I felt that the split between tools and types wouldn't be real until there were tools that could work with multiple types. The simplest one I could think of was a meme² generator. This let you re-post other creations ALL-CAPS text overlaid. Honestly this one kind of worried me. How would it be used? Did it fit the vibe? Was I adding a comment section!?

I created a confused butterfly meme to check. The result was amazing:

I find it interesting that I don't really know who I was talked to here. In the world of commodified social media it's entertaining to play in space that's not designed for the convenience of advertisers. Yes, this is true of Mastodon, but the vibe there is still heavily inspired by social media.

The project itself is structured as a Jam. All PRs are accepted with the comment "merging without checking". This meant I could add the meme-based comment section safe in the knowledge that anyone else could remove them easily. It also means that the site can change drastically day-to-day: yesterday it had fancy CSS and like buttons, today much it's much simpler. What it look like tomorrow?

What's next for me? I've added the beginnings of a "gamify" tool and I have PLANS! I think you should check out the Pondiverse.