Finding Poetry in the Digital Wilderness

The internet, despite being a hellscape of algorithmic manipulation and corporate surveillance, still has these adorable little corners where people build utterly pointless things with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for those who haven’t yet realized we’re all just distracting ourselves on our collective journey toward oblivion.

When I stumbled across Simon Willison’s blog post about a new method to hook into the Bluesky firehose through a websocket (as one does when avoiding actual responsibilities), I irresponsibly dedicated some of my finite time in this dimension to the following question: “Hey, I wonder if I could find accidental poetry in the endless stream of social media posts before the inevitable heat death of the universe renders all human expression meaningless?”

Most sensible people would’ve bookmarked the article and gone about their day. But there I was, writing code to count syllables in strangers’ social media posts. Let’s be real though, I used an npm package to do the hard part of counting syllables and asked Claude to help with the rest (more on using LLMs to actually finish side projects instead of letting them rot in the deep dark depths of my Github account). The result? Firefly — a website that sits quietly in its corner of the internet, watching the stream of consciousness flow by, occasionally lighting up when it spots a 5-7-5 syllable pattern hiding in someone’s thoughts.

Pictured: A screenshot of Firefly, a website that finds haikus in the Bluesky firehose.

As expected, the “poetry” it discovers is usually mediocre — random thoughts divided arbitrarily into lines based onsyllable counts yields mostly nonsensical haiku structures. And yet, there’s something freeing about it. I love there are still so many people experimenting without purpose, failing without consequence, and finding joy in the simple act of making something just because we can.

with ❤️ from kevin