Catch a Bird: A Tree Where Strangers' Joyful Sentences Land
Catch a Bird – I made it for my own sanity
Catch a Bird is an anonymous experiment from Hungary where you write one sentence about what made you happy, and it becomes a bird on a shared tree. Visitors can catch birds to read a stranger's sentence, feed them seeds to keep them around longer, and collect fed birds in a personal bird book. The tree grows new branches as more birds arrive. No sign-up, no names—just one sentence, freely given and freely caught.
Somewhere in the world, somebody was glad about something, and said so.
- noduerme
This is great. Really.
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.
- Cider9986
Favorited.
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.
- lemontheme
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
- Bird sounds. I put this on in the background: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/springWalkSoundscapeGenera...
- deanebarker
My cat was not happy about this at all. He sat and watched it for five minutes, tail wagging ominously. While I am happy that thoughts were set free by people, my cat wanted all thoughts to die a horrible death.
- TriadDarren
Terrific idea! Does it have the ability to translate into a default language (for each user)?
- ceroxylon
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.
- roldie
Love this! Was really nice to read all of them
- gkhartman
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.