ssh.place: A Shared Pixel Canvas You Draw On Over SSH — No Account Needed

ssh.place is a communal drawing board reachable entirely through SSH. Running ssh ssh.place drops you onto a single shared 200×60 grid where anyone can place colored cells. There’s nothing to install and nothing to sign up for — any SSH key authenticates you, and the key doubles as your identity for rate limiting.

The interaction model borrows from Reddit’s r/place: you move a cursor with arrow keys, wasd, or vim-style hjkl, pick one of 16 colors, and drop a solid block with the spacebar. Because the canvas is wider than a typical terminal, you pan around it, with shift+arrows jumping a full screen. A 15-second cooldown throttles every placement, and it’s tied to your SSH key rather than your session, so disconnecting and reconnecting won’t let you paint faster. The server also rejects anything containing a character, keeping the board strictly visual — no text graffiti allowed.

The project is a neat demonstration of using SSH public-key authentication as a frictionless, install-free identity and access layer for an interactive app. It sidesteps account creation entirely by leveraging keys users already have, while the per-key cooldown provides basic abuse resistance. The web page itself is read-only; all edits happen over the SSH connection.