The pattern community is live — share and remix patterns from anywhere

[engmung]

The pattern community is live: https://community.patternflow.work

It is a place to publish the patterns you make, and to take apart the ones other people made.

What you can do there

• Browse and edit without an account. Open any pattern, turn its four knobs, change the code, and watch the matrix respond — no sign-up, nothing installed. The account only appears when you want to save something.
• Remix anything. Take a pattern into Pattern Lab, change it, publish it back. The fork is recorded, so a pattern carries a link to whatever it grew out of.
• Find patterns you can flash right now. Patterns are written in JavaScript, but the board runs C++. When an author has ported theirs and tested it on real hardware, they can attach the .h — those are marked hardware ready, and you can filter the feed down to just them.
• Comment, and like the ones you want to come back to.

Every pattern carries its licence, author and date inside the source itself, so credit survives being copied out of the page rather than downloaded.

Why it exists

Patternflow is meant to be built by people anywhere, but until now sharing a pattern meant Discord — which is blocked or restricted in Iran, Turkey, Russia, China and elsewhere. We had already met makers who built a Patternflow and then could not show anyone. That is a bad reason to lose someone's work.

So the community runs on its own server, and signing in is a username and a password. Not Google, not GitHub, not Discord — none of which help if the thing you cannot reach is the login page. Email is optional and only used for password recovery; no verification mail is ever sent.

Discord is not going anywhere. Nothing moves, nothing closes. This adds a door rather than replacing one — Discord stays the place to hang around and talk, and if it works for you, keep using it.

It is yours to run too

The whole thing is in the repository: SQLite, plain Node, no managed services. docs/COMMUNITY_DEPLOY.md walks through standing up your own instance — a mirror, a local community, whatever is useful where you are. The current one runs on a Raspberry Pi, which should tell you how modest the requirements are.

It is early

This has been running for a few days. Things will be rough, and some of them will only show up once patterns start piling in — searching, tagging, and sorting are deliberately minimal until it is clear what people actually need.

If something is broken, confusing, or missing, say so here or open an issue. Tracking issue: #184.

Go and post a pattern.