Place

What is Place and what is it for?

Place is an experimental Holochain app for drawing together on a shared pixel canvas, in the spirit of Reddit's r/place. A group of participants each Place coloured pixels on one common square grid, and the picture that builds up belongs to that group.

Place is an experimental Holochain app built to reproduce the shared-canvas idea behind Reddit's r/place, where a crowd gradually paints one picture pixel by pixel. The repository, in the Lightningrod Labs organisation, describes it plainly as an experimental app for pixel wars, and its code is organised around a DNA plus a web UI and an Electron wrapper.

On a Place network there is one square canvas, and its side length is set when the network is defined. A participant claims a pixel by assigning it one of sixteen indexed colours at an {x,y} position, and the network's settings decide how often each person may Place one: time is divided into buckets, and an agent gets a set number of pixels per bucket. Every placement is stored as part of the shared data, and the canvas state is periodically assembled into snapshots so that a newcomer can load the picture rather than replay every pixel ever placed.

One documented example is how those snapshots are built. The state of the canvas at a given bucket comes from every placement up to the previous bucket, and once half of the following bucket has elapsed any node may attempt to render a snapshot if none exists yet. The repository README is the Place to learn more: it sets out the DNA properties, the snapshot model, the project layout and the build commands. It is also where the project marks its Holo host and Launcher packaging sections OUTDATED, which is why this page treats Place as a historical, documented project rather than a supported product.

From 3 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.