Hello HN. I’ve been out of the solo indie hacking game for over ten years. I always wanted to branch out from building CRUD APIs and web apps into game development. But I always found the learning curve difficult.

I saw a post about the guy who made the “1 million checkboxes” page and how a group of random users was sending him binary-encoded messages by checking various combinations of checkboxes to build readable URLs in the data, which he eventually saw and visited. I just thought that was so cool. Reminded me of the old days on the Internet .. stuff like “million dollar homepage.”

And so, the idea for 9millionpixels was born. A concept similar to r/Place but the pixels expire after 24 hours. If you want to paint them permanently, you can pay a little extra money to carve out your own small piece of Internet lore & history. Hey—who knows right?

I hope you enjoy my lil app/game and maybe have some fun with it. I’m working on an API—so soon you’d be able to do something like: define a 2d array of hex color codes with a starting x,y position on the canvas, then use cron/etc to automatically paint an image of your choosing on the canvas slowly over time.