The Canvas event is the Fediverse’s take on the r/place event, I.E, a collaborative artwork where every participant can place down a single pixel every 30 seconds.
This limitation means the only way to assemble a larger piece of art is for people to come together in groups to collectively decide what they’ll be drawing, where it will be, and communicate with other groups working on neighboring artworks so as not to impede their efforts, or even to negotiate mutual aid treaties to help maintain each other’s art from potential hit-and-run attacks.
SLRPNK participated in 2024’s Canvas event, which @Five@slrpnk.net documented in one of our previous Monthly Meta’s.
If there are any Solarpunks interested in participating this year, this thread might be a good place to organize and collaborate :)
The Canvas Event will take place at this link On July 17th, and run for 48 hours.
FWIW this is only true for people in UTC-5 through UTC-12, about 9% of the world population.
It starts on July 18th 04:00 UTC.
Here’s my template (sized 46x46). It’s a little rough around the edges, and we can change it up to make it more attractive. It features a sunflower in the center, symbolizing hope and the sun itself. The inspiration for the quote came from the write-up in the instance wiki.
Upscaled version:
Original version:
Nice work, Terra! Love the cool banner style around the sunflower, and a great message! :D
I did a couple touches to it to increase contrast, and moved the B down one pixel to line up with the I across from it.
As it doesn’t seem likely we’ll get any more template submissions, I vote we use yours :)
Smol version:
It looks much neater now. Thanks for the touch up. I’m happy to hear that you liked the idea, though I think one drawback would be that if someone sees it on the canvas, they wouldn’t know it’s from slrpnk. So probably not the best for publicity.
Maybe we can wait a little bit for others to give their opinions
That is true… Perhaps there’s a way we could manage both?
My template is fairly small, and much of it is empty space, which means we should be able to complete it fairly quickly. We could then begin assembling your design near it (if there’s open canvas still).
If we begin to run out of time, we could leave the banner parts uncolored, meaning we’d only have to draw the banner outline, letters, and flower, which would cut down the number of required pixels quite a bit.
Super! Now the banners look more on-brand lol. Great work. It would be nice to have milestone-based series of these templates. Like what are the first 20% of tiles to place. The next 20%. And so on. Itll help us sort of claim a spot early on if we only focus on an outline first. I wouldve done that part but its super late right now.
It would be nice to have milestone-based series of these templates. Like what are the first 20% of tiles to place. The next 20%. And so on.
That’s a good idea, I’ll see about working on that.
I made a team account on the Canvas pre-planning template and added our templates to a blank spot that no one else has claimed yet (I can also still edit them or move them around).
https://chocolatecakecodes.goip.de/cotemplate/ui/template/20260520-Canvas26_main
Now that we’re closing in on the opening and we’re pretty well decided on what we’re drawing, I’ll likely create a new thread for us to collaborate from, describing how to start and hopefully with a couple step-by-step 20% templates too.
There’s also a Matrix chat that canvas created for teams to organize with each other and collaborate on, but I’m not sure how many of us have Matrix accounts, since we mostly use XMPP.
I was thinking that perhaps it would be best to move closer to the Pawb.social templates, as I suspect we could rely on them for help somewhat, since we’re both lemmy instances. Thoughts?
Also @tburkhol@slrpnk.net.
Could put ProdigalFrog’s SLRPNK/logo in the center, vs sunflower? Lay the whole thing on Vegafjord’s flag, just to tie in everyone who’s put an image out there.
Either way, somebody should make a team & let the rest of us know where to start. Plus maybe a new sticky with the final details.
Hm, I tried combining them, but personally I don’t think the result is as aesthetically pleasing, Terra’s design works better with the flower.
This one gives the feel of a police badge in a way
I agree. I think I didn’t realize their relative scales.
Here’s my quick proposal for a template (sized up 1000% so it’s more easily viewable here). It’s our website name in slightly stylized lettered using the colors from our green sun logo, combined with an orange-y sun behind it. It’s 28x26 pixels large, which should make it pretty manageable for us to achieve.
I drew it using the free and open-source Pixelorama tool (which is available on all platforms). If anyone wants to try editing or adding to it, here’s the original size:
I’ll be quite busy with something else tomorrow, but maybe I can add a few pixels now and then. Does the Fediauth work with Lemmy?
Yes, I checked yesterday. It seemed to have worked. I got a DM with the otp and after typing it in, I got authentication.
That’s not a bad idea, and it would be quite easy to draw in various sizes. In past events there was usually an area of the canvas where people drew various flags together, maybe we could add this near those, while also doing a specific SLRPNK themed piece as well. If we keep it small-ish, that should be doable :)
Theres a flag area in the d2jam design you could add it into (different flags are going into hearts). Im going to rearrange it a bit so the hearts might move position a bit in the template though
I never had any idea what this was 🤣🤣 thank you for your description.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to contribute. Please add turtles somewhere. Literally everywhere if it’s possible. Aww shell-friends. 🐢
Turrrtles!!! 🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢😍
It’s the way I learned about the fuckcars subreddit a few years ago. I think this could be fun and strengthen community. I am around to participate from the European time zone.
Sounds fun. So what’re we making this time? Would be willing to spend an hour or two into it
Not sure, really. Anyone can propose a template image here within the next 3 days, then decide which we like best (hopefully something that doesn’t use too many pixels so we can ensure that we can maintain it).
I’ll try to take a crack at drawing up something for us to follow if no one else does.
So I was thinking about making a template and I realized that the size of the piece we can make depends entirely on the ‘man-hours’ our instance members can contribute. As an example, if one person can give just one hour to the event, they can place ~100 pixels (not 120 since we’re not bots lol) so that’s a 10x10 space. So four people contributing 1 hour each or one person contributing 4 hours can enable us to make a 20x20 piece. And so on… So I was wondering if there is a way we can get a rough idea of our total ‘man-hours’ so we can make a decent sized piece? We can wing it and make a small one and then expand it / make more if we have more people but the former method might be more resource effecient maybe.
I’m not entirely sure how big we could realistically make it. It’s possible we’ll get some outside help once the event begins from our neighboring artworks, but probably best to assume low-ish participation, and be a bit restrained in size.
Guessing just on gut feeling, I think we could probably manage up to 30x30 okay, and maybe 40x40 if we get a few people who really get into it. My own proposal is 28x26.
Front page says slrpnk.net has 180 users/day. Maybe 10% of them would do canvas for a while? I don’t imagine even that many would commit an hour to obsessive pixel-clicking; maybe not even 100 times over the course of a day…
Hmmm, then maybe 900 pixels could be a reasonable template size; 30x30 or 25x36
I found that the Canvas event actually has stats available for how many pixels were placed by each instance in previous events, and how many users participated. In 2024, 13 of our users participated and placed 3100 pixels.
I think it’s best to be flexible - easy to scale up or down. It only takes a couple of people to get really excited, or to write a bot, and suddenly you get an enormous pixel budget. Start with something modest, then ramp up if there’s a lot of activity.
My recollection is that lemmy canvas is less confrontational than reddit, so less need to reserve pixels for defense.
Firstly: this sounds neat! I took part in the original r/Place back in the day, and had a blast! So it’s neat to see the Fediverse doing community projects like this.
Secondly: is that a Hello Internet flag in the top left corner? I haven’t thought about that podcast in years! I was always more of a Flaggy Flag Tim, myself
I found out about Lemmy’s Canvas event just after it ended last time. I’ve been waiting all year for this!
@ProdigalFrog do you know if there’s a hashtag to follow? (maybe #canvas?)
@compfu @ProdigalFrog as ProdigalFrog mentioned, i am the Canvas account for Mastodon(+similar) ✨
If you’re apart of the threadiverse (Lemmy/mbin) the community is at https://toast.ooo/c/canvas
I think you should be able to follow @canvas@fediverse.events for updates from mastodon (alternative direct link here) :)
@ProdigalFrog Thanks! Seems like they are using #canvas2026 👍
I’ll try to help if I don’t miss it :D
The website didn’t load properly on my phone, does anyone happen to have the exact date?
Awesome! :)
I believe it starts Friday on the 17th, and will allow people to put down pixels for 48 hours before closing again.
i won’t be participating, but that’s cute
this sounds fun! i won’t be available much on the first day, but since it’s 48 hours, i’m sure i’ll have time on day 2! :)
