Every social media feed is, functionally, an unmanageable crowd of voices rendered as a scrolling list — which is precisely the metaphor developer Cee (@cee.wtf) decided to stop hiding. Throng, a browser-based 3D interface for Bluesky, takes the platform’s live public firehose and renders it as an actual first-person crowd: hundreds of avatars standing around you, each speaking a real post aloud as you approach.
A feed you navigate instead of scroll
Throng streams directly from Bluesky’s public firehose — the same real-time stream of every public post on the network — and spawns an avatar for each one, positioned in a 3D space the user walks through with standard game controls (WASD to move, mouse to look, space to jump; touch controls are supported too). Two modes set the intensity: CAMPFIRE, a comparatively calm scene with around 30 people speaking one at a time, and BEDLAM, which crowds in 400 simultaneous avatars with 20 speaking over each other at once. CDM’s own description of the experience captures the intended arc: “you’re just relaxing by a peaceful campfire… then, like a really chatty zombie invasion, they come. And keep coming.” Users can filter the feed to everyone posting publicly or narrow it to just the accounts they follow, and the whole thing is built to work with headphones for full spatial-audio effect.
The point is the overwhelm
Cee has cited influences ranging from Second Life and IRC to science-fiction depictions of overwhelming sensory input, and Throng reads less as a practical Bluesky client than as a piece of interactive commentary on what an unfiltered, real-time information stream actually feels like once it’s given a physical, spatial form instead of a scrolling text column. The project is upfront about being “beautifully sloppy by design,” and carries a real content warning: because it pulls unmoderated public posts straight from the firehose, anything posted publicly on Bluesky — including NSFW content — can and will show up as a voice in the crowd.