This was a fun little project that I did to explore the AT Protocol and Bluesky data.
I didn't have a clear vision when I started out, I experimented with a few concepts. Initially I wanted to display a shooting star every time someone posted a message that included the ⭐ emoji. But I really struggled to get that to look good.
In the end I decided to generate the star field based on all the messages people are posting on the network.
The idea being that every new message would add a star to the sky.
I got it working, deployed it, and shared it on Bluesky. The response was overwhelmingly positive! 💙
I explain in the project README how it works, but it's quite straight-forward. I connect to the Jetstream (a stream of all events on Bluesky) and display a little star whenever a new post comes in. There really isn't that much more to it 🤷
The goal was never to be perfectly accurate or display a lot of data (there are better projects for that), but instead be more tangible. If you see a metric that says there are 100 new posts every second, that's cool, but what does that actually mean? This project shows that in a way we can all understand.
And I think that is why it was so successful. It turned the scale of Bluesky into something everyone can understand.
I had a lot of fun building it, and I am really happy that so many people enjoyed it too 💙