Meet the creators of the r/place Atlas, the internet’s living mural

When time ran out for Reddit’s collaborative internet mural, r/place, people could still place pixels — but only white ones. Kicking off on April Fools’ Day, groups of Redditors spent four days cooperating and competing for space on the mural. The mural had become an overwhelming collection of flags and fandom references by its final day. It quickly faded back to a blank canvas.

It was the same spirit of community that helped to preserve the r/place Canvas. Reddit’s official last capture was not yet released. Thousands of users began collecting timelapses and screenshots from their daily lives and shared them online. This included fun recreations and experiments — for example, what if every black pixel ever placed had been permanent — which became popular on the subreddit, where users still hung out, even without a canvas to work on.

These preservation efforts include the 2022 r/place Atlas, an ambitious attempt to fully document this year’s canvas. This site displays the entire canvas and provides descriptions for each area being hovered. It’s also possible to search entries for keywords and find the associated areas of the mural that way.

Image: 2022, r/place Atlas

It was a team effort. The mural can be shared by users, who have the option to submit details about the image, the background and the creators. Stefano Haagmans, the lead developer of the Atlas, said that it is popular due to groups having formed in order to collaborate on r/place. “R/place is such a big project for some people that they just created literal communities for it,” said Haagmans. “And because of it, people enjoy it when it’s categorized, when it’s archived.”

A similar document exists for 2017’s r/place, but 2022’s r/place attracted so many more contributors, helping the Atlas quickly take off in a way that Haagmans wasn’t expecting. The Atlas’ basic elements were created by him and he shared them on Reddit. After that, he went to sleep and took part in an exam. “When I was finished with my exam, I looked at my Reddit, Discord, plus GitHub notifications,” he said. “They were being flooded.”

The Atlas is powered by Netlify, and the archival project outstripped the bandwidth available in Netlify’s free plan almost immediately, thanks to the sheer number of visitors. The Atlas team needed to contact Netlify for help. They moved them onto an open source version, saving them huge expenses.

Haagmans hired others as helpers, such as Alex Tsernoh who provided imagery for Atlas. “I was originally the first person to start downloading all the data from place as it was happening, and while doing that I got hundreds of people writing to me about using that for their own projects,” Tsernoh said. Tsernoh was one of them, and offered to help with further development.

Tsernoh has recently added the timeline to Atlas, which allows users to track the development of the r/place map over the past four days. It is important to certain fan groups, since factions competed for space and messages. During that time, a lot of artwork was lost, while the static Atlas version had captured only the last canvas.

Vicky was a Whitepot Studios developer who worked with a Discord team in creating a column of artworks from allies that was erased right before final capture. “The canvas history being live now is great as we can at least watch our column alliance’s first rally against the void, and then subsequent consumption,” she said.

Contributors can’t currently make entries on earlier versions of the canvas, so the mentions of Whitepot Studios currently correspond to the “void” spot that destroyed the original artwork. Haagmans is hopeful that Whitepot Studios and other similar organizations will one day be able add their name to all artworks created in the same time frame. It may be difficult, as there are so many entries and not enough volunteers to help with development.

Every volunteer has different amounts of time. However, Tsernoh and Haagmans are currently studying. Haagmans is in the middle of his exams, and Tsernoh told me that his Masters’ dissertation was due three hours from when we were speaking. “This is a really interesting time for an interview,” he laughed.

Image: 2022, r/place Atlas

A Wiki will also be created, by Aeywoo, a volunteer, to record more back-and-forth between groups. “We’re planning on having pages like, this faction that built the French flag and this streamer’s community fought and the outcome was either this artwork got deleted or the streamer got destroyed after a few hours,” Aeywoo described.

These types of disagreements were included, even though the Atlas team deliberately chose to do so, regardless of whether one side was generally not popular in the r/place communities. “We intend to still archive it, because our job is not to make it how we want it to be, but [preserve] it how it is,” Haagmans said. Where conflicting user submissions exist, for example, from the streamer’s community and from others whose artwork was destroyed, the development team describes the events that transpired, rather than anyone’s personal feelings on them.

Only deliberate griefing is fully removed, although the developers said there hasn’t been too much of it. “We do get the occasional, ‘hey, the French, they botted this. We don’t want them here, they are complete leftists,’ that kind of stuff,” Haagmans said. Aeywoo was familiar with the grief and had worked on Wikis dedicated to YouTubers who passed on. Protections were put in place to prevent this from happening.

Contributors want to be a part of the event, but for the most part they are just trying to do so. “The appeal of r/place is putting your mark on history for some people. For other communities it’s just the fun they had with the people they created with. And that’s also one of the reasons why we created the [Atlas]. The memory of R/place is always a fond one. I personally wanted to make sure that was preserved for anyone who wanted to look back onto it,” Haagmans said.

Or, summarized more simply by Aeywoo: “Being part of history in the internetscape is pretty cool.”