OK! At least the other batch of suggestions was more useful :) Those are fair points.

So mass harassment vs creator.

Full stop here. That is not even remotely close to what I said, to what I implied, or to the consequences of either; by implying otherwise, you’re being at the very least a liar, so cut off the crap.

If you had actual concerns regarding harassment (odds are that you don’t), you’d do better if you raised them towards the people organising the event, to change its rules, than trying to boss participants around with a thinly disguised “fuck off unless you play the game in the way that I order you to play”.

I’m not wasting my time further with you.

Yes, even if I dislike the outcome. All is fair in love and war, and a good canvas should be a bit of both.

The issue that you might be noticing is on another level: perhaps we shouldn’t know who placed a pixel, to avoid a group ganging up on an individual. I do not know.

(Still, what I’m proposing is not even remotely close to that. It’s group vs. group.)

But then the whole canvas is useless.

Nope. The canvas is a game; what matters is not the end result, but the process. It’s all about people organising themselves towards certain goals, that conflict with the others’ goals, and how they solve it through cooperation and competition.

That’s we were there on first place, even if copypasting random pixel art in Kolourpaint would be faster and easier.

If there just too many trolls then its no fun

Again, not even the void is trolling.

That said, having too much competition would make it unfun, but so is having too little.

As already discussed ad nauseam through the thread:

People who don’t want those huge flags in the canvas have the exact same right to organise themselves and use the rules of the game to undo those flags, as the people who are making those flags. So cut off this “you either leave them alone or sod off” discourse, OK? That’s what you’re saying under different words.

Not even the void is trolling.

Annoyance in this sort of online game is part of the game, like it or not.

Ah, the “our holy symbol” was copypasted from my earlier comment, so it doesn’t address what you’ve already said in the meantime.

I also don’t think that we’ll find common ground. It’s sounding more and more like different moral premises; and yes, what you said made sense (even if I disagree with it).

I’ll clip the quotes for succinctness.

That might be true, but depending on the flag […] don’t just blindly copy a template.

I think that you’re referring to the struggle of adapting an intricate pattern to a lower resolution, as the solutions for that struggle can be considered artistic. There are two catches however:

1. This applies mostly to flags with emblems (as Mexico’s) or text (as Saudi Arabia’s). Those are typically not the concern in this sort of coop/compete online canvas.
2. That artistic value is mostly relevant for smaller flags. And given that the proposal is to cut down larger flags into size, it’ll actually increase their artistic value.

I believe that most people […] don’t do it because they’re a nationalists or […] onto other people.

Think a bit less on the people being nationalists and more on the discourse that those people are conveying being a nationalistic one.

That goes back to the point I made earlier about the two types of communities; […] in the spirit of the whole event.

I don’t think that those two types of user (ones willing vs. not willing to have drawings on a flag) map even remotely well to non-nationalists vs. nationalists. And, in any group posting any sort of country flag, you will have a mix of both types anyway, and it’ll be impossible for anyone to enforce it one or another way.

Furthermore, when it comes to flag posters allegedly respecting the others’ drawings, it goes often as I described in another comment; under a discourse that sounds a lot like “this is the land of Our Holy Symbol. However, since we’re magnanimous, we shall turn a blind eye to your doodle defacing it.”, while co-opting those the people drawing random stuff to defend the flag posters’ flag, against other flags or actual drawings (as the people drawing random still likely care about the surroundings of their own drawing).

About the spirit of the event, see below.

I guess I just want everyone to get along and work together, rather than against each other. Reddit’s r/place was a battlefield where only the biggest communities even had a chance of maintaining their works; I just want Lemmy canvas to be a bit more relaxed, that’s all.

If the game was only about getting along and working together, it would be completely different. Factions like The Void would be banned on the spot, there would be a larger canvas to accommodate everyone, multi-accounting wouldn’t be so discouraged, there would be measures discouraging people from undoing the others’ drawings…

And yet none of those things happen. Because both cooperation and competition are part of the spirit of the game. In fact, I’d argue that they’re sides of the same coin, with the actual spirit being to mirror human social interactions in something inconsequential. It’s a bit like a political simulator, you know?

Even then I think that the Fediverse canvas will stay far more relaxed than the one in Reddit.

Not quite “to protect it”; more like “to ignore it”. Even if the drawings are nationalistic in nature. For multiple reasons:

1. Less targets = less effort.
2. Easier to coordinate efforts towards something clear-cut (like “this is a flag”), than something that is often up to debate (like “this is a nationalistic symbol”).
3. Those drawings are typically more elaborated than “me maeks flag”. As such, their artistic value is (for me) higher.
4. The interpretation of a drawing as a nationalistic symbol depends heavily on the context, usually provided by the flag. (Think for example on a Taj Mahal on itself vs. a Taj Mahal mit an Indian flag. Or, dunno, a kiwi fruit with a NZer flag.)

But the main reason is that, while I personally despise nationalism and all that “muh country! lol lmao heil!” babble, the idea is to coordinate people based on the goal, not the reason behind chasing said goal. Some might share my worldviews of nationalistic symbols being bad, but most won’t - some will be there just to see the canvas burn, some for the sake of carving room for another (and hopefully smaller) flag, etc.

Now, regarding the effort necessary to put something on the canvas, and the fact that we’ll be reverting the result of the hours that they spent there: at the end of the day, the Canvas is solely a game. And even if they might dislike it, this sort of “you did it and I undid it” is part of the game.

I really don’t mean to offend you, I just want to understand where you’re coming from with this.

Don’t worry about it; you aren’t offending me.

I also apologise for the defensive tone that I took towards you at the start; I was expecting a lot of sealioning in this thread, from some flag posters, and it did happen, however you’re clearly not sealioning, so you didn’t deserve that tone.

I’m stealing this pic. It’s awesome.

Sorry for the double reply. Another thing that I realised in the meantime is that people working on flags won’t be willing to divert time too much time to undo defacement of another flag. So as long as we concentrate our efforts towards a single flag, the opposition of other flag-posters will be spotty at best.

IIRC the discussion was about redoing the second take of her feet for some depth.

could we incorporate artwork over the flag like it happened with the Australian flag?

My main idea is to deface the flag, so I’d ask people to not integrate the artwork. But if you do integrate the artwork I’d ask people to leave it alone and focus on the flag itself, so it would be safe.

What I mean to say is that violence can be liberatory instead of oppressive

Fair point.

Then IMO we should left the artwork alone but still pick on the flag. Specially on iconic parts, that are typically uncovered by artwork. (In the case of the Mexican flag it would be the eagle over the cactus)

Come to think of it, the national anthem is also about the flag. We have a real fetish for cloth crafting.

Acc. to a map that I found it’s relatively uncommon, but it does pop up for other governments (mostly Albania, Somalia, Switzerland, Turkey). So… yeah, your power structure does have a fetish for cloth crafting.

(Most other countries anthems talk about killing, self-references, or worship some individual. In the meantime almost none talks about friendship, and based on this map none seems to acknowledge that the world is not just the territory controlled by its government.)

If you undo the changes dome by a bot it could cause chaos. It is better to let users know it needs to be fixed.

It could cause chaos if done poorly, indeed. But I think that there are ways to minimise this chaos.

One of them would be that reverted pixels are marked as “reverted by the admins”, and that appears in an overlay similar to the heatmap.

Also you could do some sort of proof of work to make it unfeasible to have a bunch of alts.

Like in cryptography? I like this idea. Perhaps it could be used when there’s a reasonable possibility that two accounts are from the same user; for example same IP, or same username but different instance, etc.

That flaw is an issue, indeed. And it’s worth thinking on ways to reduce it.

However, there are two things in our side:

1. the proportion of people holding critic and informed views about flags on Canvas is likely way higher than in r/place.
2. due to the nature of the symbol in question (country flags), herds of “large-flaggers” will likely have trouble coordinating with each other.

Ultimately, flags are just symbols similar to any other logo.

Emphasis mine. I get your reasoning here and I agree with it; it’s just that those specific symbols are egregiously problematic in this sort of “collab+compete Paint simulator”.

I’m aware of the oath of allegiance, and that it’s an oath to a flag. On its own, this sounds ridiculous already - a symbol for another symbol, just like Brazil’s hymn to the flag.

But being forced to recite it at the start of the day is news for me, and throws the “disgusting” factor up the roof. Even if it was with adults, and not reciting it was only socially awkward, it would be already a clear violation of consent. Swap the adults with kids and have their superiors (the school staff) forcing them to do so, and it gets way worse.

This also shows really well that a flag is not the symbol of a population, it’s the symbol of a government. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense to require to have them to pledge allegiance.

Sadly, I don’t think that the US government is special in this aspect. Governments are like this.

I’m satisfied with how things turned out, with art going all over the flag and the stars shining through, but it didn’t seem considerate in the beginning.

It’s often like this, to give you a false impression of a compromise. I’ve seen it all the time in r/place, for example. (Doubly true in pixelplanet, but that’s… eh, let’s say that biggest drawing there is a swastika.)

And typically, it goes like this:

1. Claim a huge space of the canvas for the sake of the flag.
2. Lay waste over whatever is in the middle of the way, be it drawings or flags from other herds.
3. “Oh fuck, it’s too big for us to defend. People are drawing random stuff over it.”
4. Eventually let the people drawing random stuff to do it, under the terms dictated by the flag itself. Under a discourse that sounds a lot like “this is the land of Our Holy Symbol. However, since we’re magnanimous, we shall turn a blind eye to your doodle defacing it.”
5. [If applicable] Shift the blame of the step #2 on others. “Nooo, I didn’t do it. Others did.”

Besides the façade of compromise, there’s also a second motivation for fourth last step: it’s a way to co-opt people drawing random stuff to protect the flag, as they likely care about the surroundings of their own drawings.

Please do note, however, that people drawing those large flags do not want to reach an actual compromise. And playing nice (cooperation) only works if the other side is also playing nice - we shouldn’t be playing dove in a hawk-dove game.

Limiting the template regardless of what’s being drawn is an idea worth discussing with the devs.