This is neat. I like the zen background sounds. I'm particularly fascinated by digital third places with extremely limited social interaction (like cursor camp by Neal). I think it has something to do with the impossibility of something like this happening in real life.

That said, I'm not sure how real the "koi you see are other people visiting the pond together with you" bit is. I only ever saw 3 swimming koi. Maybe that's the base.

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hxii 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hey! That’s the base, correct. Three are always there so if someone joins and nobody else is using it – they’re never alone.

In essence, when you someone joins the counter goes up and another koi will spawn locally.

It’s a bit nerfed from my initial idea to sync the movement of each koi, but I might do that in the future.

It looks like the way I deployed (Railway) it causes `429 Too Many Requests` to be returned, so I’ll definitely have to look into that. But it’s 1:21 AM so tomorrow.

Thank you for letting me know!

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p1necone 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I noticed the koi pop in and out of existence on visible parts of the screen - it would be nice if incoming koi swam into frame from offscreen, and outgoing koi swam offscreen before disappearing.

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dolebirchwood 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, that was very jarring. I didn't bother reading the intro text that said the other fish are other people on the site, so I just thought this was janky crap. The creator shouldn't assume people read anything. I see a button that says "Enter", I click - I'm not reading anything else. So it's going to cause a lot of confusion when I arrive in a pond filled with way too many fish for a zen-like experience, and even more annoyance at the constant flickering in and out.

	▲	hxii 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for the feedback! It’s definitely on my project task list. So far the options I thought of were to fade or scale the koi as they enter or leave the pond. I will try to see what will work visually here.

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applfanboysbgon 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It appeared to be real earlier, or at least simulated being real. I watched for 10 minutes and there were ~10 koi in my pool, with koi routinely flickering in and out of existence as though they suddenly joined or left. That said, I see three static koi now. Entirely conceivably that HN killed the backend and triggered a failsafe.

	▲	keithnz 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		lots and lots of koi at the moment!