skymash
two Bluesky profiles, side by side — latest 50 posts each, scroll and compare. click the one you like more. rankings are pure Elo from head-to-head votes, nothing else. Zuckerberg built the prototype for this in a Harvard dorm room in one night; we just gave it Elo math and consent.
pick one
leaderboard
loading votes from across the network…
nominate an account
open to anyone — nominate any Bluesky account, no threshold to clear. we still show each nominee's cluster score (mutual-follow pool size, widened to plain follows if that pool is thin — the same metric the sites/simcluster* family uses) for context, it's just no longer a gate. see about for the full rule.
current pool
loading nominees…
not want in?
anyone can nominate any account — you don't need to opt in. if you'd rather not be in the pool, sign in above and remove yourself; this excludes you from nominations past and future, regardless of who nominates you.
about
skymash is a head-to-head comparison game for Bluesky profiles, Facemash-style: two accounts, their latest posts, click the one you like more. Built off a spec posted by a mutual of Rob's, linking to a static write-up at gideon-goddard.github.io.
the original Facemash
The format is a direct lift from Facemash, the site a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg built and shipped in one sitting on the night of October 28, 2003, from his Harvard dorm room. He scraped photos out of Harvard's online house facebooks — some by hacking into poorly-secured directories, since Harvard hadn't built a unified one yet — and put two students side by side with a single question: "who's hotter?" It got roughly 450 visitors and 22,000 votes in its first four hours before Harvard shut it down. Zuckerberg was charged by the university with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and was put on academic probation — though all charges were later dropped. Less than five months later he launched Thefacebook.com from the same dorm. skymash keeps the two-photo, click-the-one-you-like-more core of Facemash and throws out everything Zuckerberg got in trouble for: nothing here is scraped without consent, nominees can remove themselves at any time, and every vote is a public record the voter signs themselves — no admin database, no unilateral Zuckerberg-style decision to just take the photos and put them online.
cluster score
Nomination is open to everyone — any Bluesky account can be
nominated into the comparison pool, no threshold to clear.
(Originally there was a 40+ cluster-score bar; @fromthewestmeadow.com
asked to open it up to everyone on the site, not just the simcluster
people, so it's gone.) Each nomination still records a cluster
score for context: the account's mutual-follow pool size —
everyone who follows them and is followed back — widened to plain
follows if that pool is too thin to be meaningful. This is the same
"community positioning" metric the sites/simcluster*
family already uses across this constellation. It is
not a follower count, and it's shown purely as
flavor now, not a gate.
ranking
Rankings come purely from head-to-head votes, replayed as standard Elo (starting rating 1500, K=32) in the order votes were cast. Nothing else — no likes, no follower counts, no engagement — feeds into the number.
matchmaking
Most matchups pair an account with a similarly-rated neighbor, so close contests stay close instead of a 1500 facing a 2000. About 30% of the time the second pick is fully random instead — that's what surfaces brand-new nominees (no votes yet, so no reliable rating) and keeps the leaderboard from calcifying around the same few accounts always facing each other.
If you'd rather compare people you actually recognize, sign in and flip "only match people I follow" on the vote tab — matchups then only pair nominees who are both in your own follows, pulled straight from the public graph. And a matchup you don't want to weigh in on doesn't have to be voted through: "skip — show me another pair" swaps in a new pairing without recording anything.
anti-manipulation & transparency
Every nomination and every vote is a public record on the
nominator's or voter's own atproto repo — net.bisks.skymash.nomination
and net.bisks.skymash.vote — not on a server this site
controls. A vote's record key is the matchup pair, so one signed-in
account can only ever have one live vote per pair; re-voting a
pair overwrites the old vote rather than stacking duplicates. There
is no way to vote without a Bluesky account, and no way to vote on
a pair more than once per account. The whole leaderboard is
reproducible by anyone from the same public records skymash reads.
opting out
Nomination doesn't require the nominated account's consent — that's
intentional, it's the whole "earned, not opted-into" premise — but
anyone can remove themselves from the pool by signing in and
writing a net.bisks.skymash.optout record to their own
repo (see nominate). skymash only honors an
opt-out written by the account it names, so no one else can opt you
in or out on your behalf. Once written, it excludes that account
from the pool regardless of who nominates it, past or future.