Next Social
A Next.js 13 experiment that converts uploaded images to ASCII art with image-to-ascii and GraphicsMagick, as the seed of an ASCII-art social feed.
- BPM
- 133
- GRADE
- C
- LEVEL
- 4
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2023–2023
Everything As Characters
Upload a picture, get back text that looks like the picture. In October 2023 I built that in a day on Next.js 13, using image-to-ascii with GraphicsMagick doing the resampling.
The idea was a social feed made entirely of ASCII art. Every post would be characters, so every post is tiny, copy-pasteable and looks the same anywhere text shows up.
I only built the conversion step: no feed, no accounts, no posting. GraphicsMagick meant a real binary on the server instead of pure JavaScript, which was fine for a prototype.
Three months later I started over on Next.js 14 as ascii-social and did the conversion again with a different library.
led to
- scii2026images to ASCII art as a social feed