I sat there for 5 minutes reading them and then I tried to type something, and realized I couldn't think of a single thing. Just a bad day. I love that you made this, though. It's inspiring.
Beautiful. Really feels 'alive'! Impressive how many species of bird you've got here.
When I built something similar – http://alsjeditleest.be (messages in a bottle for Dutch speakers. Never really took off.) – I spent a decent amount of time researching automatic content moderation. Looks like you could some here as well. Mistral has a free moderation endpoint with ZDR. Can definitely recommend it!
Two feature requests:
- I want to be able to click away the message window without making the bird leave
For feedback, I'd say make it more obvious to feed. The icon is not obvious and you'd likely feed a lot more than flag.
It would be bad if people make bots to spam non human birds even if they could be prevented from being straight up bad, even good seeming birds that aren't human would be a drag. I imagine text based would be hard due to the extremely short nature. And obviously we don't want to compromise anonymity.
I really like the general site UI.
The birds you feed kinda pile up in a long list. I feel like it makes them insignificant. Perhaps embrace ephemerality? Idk how to solve this.
open source?
reply to birds? Birds could have comments. No privacy, but anonymity.
i don't understand the manual send away button.
Clean AI/translator text content from website.
Do birds stop eventually? I assume so. Maybe a button to send one back out there from your fed list.
Really beautiful, I was tearing up reading all of the positivity, from simple to complex. A lot of tech stuff, a lot of "dog / my dog", a lot of spouses, kids, food... all so wonderful.
Hi Eduard, I'm Levente from HU too. I love the whole concept, I had a similar idea to do it, when I found this site: https://pudding.cool/2026/02/happy-map/ just don't have the time to work on. It's a similar, just not dynamic as yours. Love the design and everything just somehow you should filter the spam with LLM or I don't know, but right now there are lot of birds with "asd" like sentences.
It added mine as my old home town but I haven't been to that location for a while and it's 20 miles away from where I was when I posted.
Update: I am on mobile, used chrome and Firefox, normal and incognito mode. All show my old town location, Max mind says my IP is in a different town 70 miles away. Either some super odd coincidence and stale geoip lookup or some very advanced device fingerprinting tracking! Feels too odd to be a coincidence
This is really neat. I love this sort of project. Reminds me of the early days of the Internet while adding some positivity to the world. Thanks for sharing.
I find it interesting that if you switch between languages on the site and the language has a local variant of the proverb, the text will have an additional paragraph explaining it.
E.g. this is the case in French, English or German, while other languages seem to fall back to the English "happy as a lark" one. (And all of them refer to the Hungarian proverb of course)
Did the translation model do that "on its own" or was that a conscious decision?
This is lovely. And also quite clever in the mechanic - as well as being beautiful it makes abuse by ‘the internet’ which is always so inevitable with any open message posting, not very rewarding since it just comes and goes.
I flagged a few and then it started telling me that I flagged too many birds for the day. A real shame that the vast majority of the birds I got to see was fake ones.
Thank you for building this, it's a beautiful reminder that the world is pretty awesome, and it's something I am gonna keep up on my third screen when I need a smile.
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It's a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn't finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don't know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I'd love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.
Hi there, Hetzner here. I saw you mentioned us, so I tried it out. That's a really cool idea, and I'll pass it onto some people who I think will appreciate it. :D Glad we could be a part of this. --Katie
This is a great idea and deserves more attention. One thing I'd mention is maybe a guide on the symbols. I wasn't sure what they did and got a crumb & feeding by accident.
I have the same feeling about the icon for breadcrumbs. But I don't have a better idea yet. On mobile, it might be a good idea to add some clues on the first visit.
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It’s a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn’t finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don’t know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I’d love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.
I sat there for 5 minutes reading them and then I tried to type something, and realized I couldn't think of a single thing. Just a bad day. I love that you made this, though. It's inspiring.
> I went outside for the first time since suffering a panic attack last time I went out.
… from Pakistan. A good reminder that some folks have it harder than others.
When I built something similar – http://alsjeditleest.be (messages in a bottle for Dutch speakers. Never really took off.) – I spent a decent amount of time researching automatic content moderation. Looks like you could some here as well. Mistral has a free moderation endpoint with ZDR. Can definitely recommend it!
Two feature requests:
- I want to be able to click away the message window without making the bird leave
- Bird sounds. I put this on in the background: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenera...
My bird so far:
>Caught 25 times · fed 4 times · 23 cities
For feedback, I'd say make it more obvious to feed. The icon is not obvious and you'd likely feed a lot more than flag.
It would be bad if people make bots to spam non human birds even if they could be prevented from being straight up bad, even good seeming birds that aren't human would be a drag. I imagine text based would be hard due to the extremely short nature. And obviously we don't want to compromise anonymity.
I really like the general site UI.
The birds you feed kinda pile up in a long list. I feel like it makes them insignificant. Perhaps embrace ephemerality? Idk how to solve this.
open source?
reply to birds? Birds could have comments. No privacy, but anonymity.
i don't understand the manual send away button.
Clean AI/translator text content from website.
Do birds stop eventually? I assume so. Maybe a button to send one back out there from your fed list.
It added mine as my old home town but I haven't been to that location for a while and it's 20 miles away from where I was when I posted.
Update: I am on mobile, used chrome and Firefox, normal and incognito mode. All show my old town location, Max mind says my IP is in a different town 70 miles away. Either some super odd coincidence and stale geoip lookup or some very advanced device fingerprinting tracking! Feels too odd to be a coincidence
I want this as an app on my TV (TizenOS), where a different bird gets highlighted every 1-2 minues, and if I click OK on my remote I feed it.
No other features. Just that.
I find it interesting that if you switch between languages on the site and the language has a local variant of the proverb, the text will have an additional paragraph explaining it.
E.g. this is the case in French, English or German, while other languages seem to fall back to the English "happy as a lark" one. (And all of them refer to the Hungarian proverb of course)
Did the translation model do that "on its own" or was that a conscious decision?
And i think i can tell the ones from HN (in a good way), they are often like "showed a client a really cool feature i made and they loved it."
> I didn't sleep the entire night and it's 7 am but I am unemployed
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It's a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn't finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don't know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I'd love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.
>I'd love to hear what break
One bird got "stuck", midair, between the trees for a while. I clicked it two or three times and then it flew to a branch.
Things are rough here lately, and I noticed I stopped seeing the small good things. They are still there, just covered by the big bad ones. 18 years ago I built a little project that collected positive tweets, and reading them changed me more then I expected. So I made a new one, for my own sanity.
It’s a tree. You leave one sentence about what made you happy today, and it lands as a bird. The rest you find out by trying. (In Hungarian, very happy people can catch birds, hence the name.)
I almost didn’t finish it. I registered the domain only recently and it went live yesterday. I showed it to some friends, they passed it on, and messages started coming in from people I don’t know. That gave me the energy back, so here it is.
Stack, since this is HN: one HTML file, no framework, a custom tree module, FastAPI + Postgres on one Hetzner box, self hosted Umami, DeepL to translate birds on demand. I vibe coded most of it, somtimes in a hurry. I needed it.
I’d love to hear what breaks, and whether a sentence from a stranger can change your day a bit.