Who is my (pixel) neighbor?

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Oleh, mentioning that they added me to a new website/project called Pixel Area, it is a 100x100 field of pixels, each of which can link to the blog or personal website of whoever claims it first. My spider senses tingled, because the email’s writing felt cold and distant, as if it was generated/translated by an LLM. However, the website looked legit, fun, and it was a genuinely interesting idea. Despite this, the footer featured links to a Bluesky (fine), Mastodon (good!) and… an X account (meh). I wondered if this was something I wanted to be involved, and continued my research. I checked the Mastodon account and saw a thread with Brennan, who was questioning who was behind the site, if it was vibecoded, and if the blogs linked on it where added with permission. You can see the short conversation there, but I also decided to reach out about it by replying to the email I got, Oleh replied back soon enough. He seemed to me like a…