mercer-bluesky

A weekend project from 👋 Even to pummel you with the real-time Bluesky firehose. Host yourself, or check out the one running on bigmood.blue.

Get it running

• npm install && npm run start in both client and server directories
• TensorFlow.js seems to not like some nodes newer than v20.17.0
• There are no authed APIs so there are no keys to get or secret handshakes to do with anyone

Notes

As of mid November 2024 the Bluesky feed has tens of images per second in the feed. As I wanted a SFW option, I'm running content filtering server-side. To make this tractable on vCPUs I've throttled the feed down to 4 images/second. If you want to see all of it, you could disable the filtering and remove the throttling. You can't really absorb that many different images so I personally prefer a small stack of images being cropped, recycled and thrown out for a new batch.

Why this thing?

In Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", Mercer's empathy box created a shared fusion state through crude tactile interfaces. This digital experiment pulses the bluesky real-time feed at 60fps with forced black frames between each image, creating after-image burns across the retina. Multiple crops of the same source material phase and interlace with unrelated images, building a perceptual static. The effect might be empathy, might be noise, might be neither.

 
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Warnings

• Limit exposure to 5 minutes
• 30 minute minimum rest between attempts
• Absolutely not for those with photosensitive conditions
• Effects subjective and unverified
• No warranty expressed or implied

Production Deployment on Free GCP e2-micro Instance

The server is optimized to run on a free Google Cloud Platform e2-micro instance (0.5 vCPU, 1GB RAM). Using systemd for process management ensures reliable operation within these constraints.

Create the following systemd user service file at ~/.config/systemd/user/mercer-bluesky.service:

[Unit]
Description=Mercer Bluesky Server
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
WorkingDirectory=/home/even/mercer-bluesky/server
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node /home/even/mercer-bluesky/server/server.js
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

# Environment settings
Environment=NODE_ENV=production
Environment=PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

# System limits and monitoring (optimized for e2-micro)
CPUQuota=95%
MemoryHigh=1G
MemoryMax=1.5G

# Logging (using journald)
StandardOutput=journal
StandardError=journal

# Graceful shutdown settings
TimeoutStopSec=30
KillMode=mixed

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Enable and start the service:

systemctl --user enable mercer-bluesky.service
systemctl --user start mercer-bluesky.service

View logs with:

journalctl --user-unit mercer-bluesky.service