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genmon

Blog author here

The multiplayer cursors are an experiment in ambient togetherness on the web...

...and what I'm learning is that ambient togetherness really doesn't scale to 500 simultaneous readers!

Please use Reader Mode for calmness, and apologies for the noise. I'll work on adding a toggle to turn them off.

btw you may be interested in the code, which you can use/fork:

https://github.com/genmon/interconnected-cursor-party

My blog is a static site, and real-time multiplayer is handled by a small app written with PartyKit (which I am super into).

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I love the cursors and already knew what everyone was commenting about without clicking through because I think another post was shared from your site a few days ago which has led to this comment thread feeling like déjà vu.

I suppose instead of showing all other users you could hash the other users into buckets and only show one from each bucket.

It'd be cool if the number of cursors could somehow scale based on the part of the text being read, same way as bullet text on Bilibili appears to increase and decrease to match the impact of what is happening in the video, but that might be tough to do without also changing the way that writing is presented online.

I actually quite like it as a reminder of the gentle chaos of the early web before the vibe shift to homogenous design.

I've spent at least 15 minutes playing with the cursor and other people on the page before even reading the article. Much fun.

edit: //////////////////////////////

I love the absurdity of it all. It makes it a unique website/blog in the ocean of sameness.

It's gone full circle. People here are commenting that the multiplayer cursors are user hostile. tbh I agree... I need to build an off switch, or at least a volume dial...

Meanwhile folks on the blog have discovered the cursor chat Easter Egg: you can hit "/" on desktop to start chatting with everyone else there.

I just screen grabbed two cursors saying the opposite to the original opinion:

> article is distracting lol

> just use inspector 2 delete article

This is hilarious chaos.

> article is distracting lol

This was me! I hope you're logging the messages being sent lol

Love the idea. Good job!

i love it, makes me feel like im at a party

that is exactly it! when you spend time on the web, there is zero way to know that the site you're on is being mobbed right now. it's so socially impoverished

I know that multiplayer cursors aren't the best way to show that, but it's a start!

I agree with the feeling and while chatting with others on the page we both felt the need to have an extension or something to be able to activate this "feature" on any website. Makes it feel like you're not alone on a website.

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