Who is my (pixel) neighbor?

I am on Pixel Area too! Despite a few caveats, I think it's neat, and perhaps you'll want to join me as well?

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Oleh, mentioning that they added me to a new website/project called Pixel Area, it is a 100x100 field of pixels, each of which can link to the blog or personal website of whoever claims it first.

My spider senses tingled, because the email’s writing felt cold and distant, as if it was generated/translated by an LLM. However, the website looked legit, fun, and it was a genuinely interesting idea. Despite this, the footer featured links to a Bluesky (fine), Mastodon (good!) and… an X account (meh). I wondered if this was something I wanted to be involved, and continued my research.

I checked the Mastodon account and saw a thread with Brennan, who was questioning who was behind the site, if it was vibecoded, and if the blogs linked on it where added with permission.

You can see the short conversation there, but I also decided to reach out about it by replying to the email I got, Oleh replied back soon enough.

He seemed to me like a pretty honest guy who just doesn’t speak English very well and didn’t have a lot of experience programming websites. I am not going to quote things since I didn’t ask for permission, but Oleh confirmed it was assisted by an LLM, just like he did to Brennan, and mentioned all the work he did himself too, in the span of multiple months.

I dislike the use of AI, I (hopefully) have been very clear about it, I think it can end up as a stain on what would otherwise be an awesome thing. I believe a project which is tied to technologies that have stolen and caused harm is not in the spirit of the indieweb or my blog.

But, I also believe that a person or a project can be decent and improve for the better, despite our disagreement on that front.

After all, Bubbles, a beloved project by a lot of the blogging community has used AI, been criticized for it, and learned and improved because of it. I think that Pixel Area, which is a lot smaller in scope, can end up being a nice thing too and slowly get better. There is a human in there who did plenty of work one way or another. I also know the blogs there were picked by a person.

I noticed too, that Oleh removed the link to X from the footer, a very good sign to me. I didn’t request for that to happen, I wonder if some others did, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

Because of all of this, I decided to be OK with the project, and I even did my own pixel-art button on my footer, since the one in the website had a whole different style for my taste… Soon enough Oleh even asked me for permission to change his own design to be pixel art too, so if you now have a super cool 88x31 pixelart button, you can thank me for that ;)

At the end of the day, it is a glorified and super cool blogroll, and I honestly can’t have enough of those.

Many of the bloggers I follow were already there, some of them have already written about it.

You can check the full directory of websites and see if you were added already. You can also request to be removed.

Perhaps not all of the people I just linked above were aware of the fact some LLM assistance was used for this, and I am sorry if that has kind of ruined the enthusiasm.

I hope Oleh learns and understands the craft that goes behind coding a website by hand, and hope he can rework and revise things in the future with a new perspective, maybe the community also reaches out to help reshape and guide the website together.

A part of me still feels like a walking contradiction because of this, don’t get me wrong. Nut it’s how I feel at the moment! I like pixels what can I say?

So, back to the question in the title! Right now you can find me at the X:85, Y:10 coordinates, in the “Echo Heights” district. There are not a lot of neighbors in that area just yet, so if you want to be close to me and you are not part of Pixel Area yet, claim your pixel!

This is day 39 of #100DaysToOffload