The "mipmap of r/place" framing is literally how I pitched it to myself when I started. Zoom level 1 = world overview, zoom level 12 = individual 1px cells, all backed by real Mercator coordinates.

Hardest part was keeping 60fps across zoom levels -- ended up going WebGL-only after profiling showed Canvas2D was the bottleneck during zoom-out. Happy to dig into the rendering architecture if anyone's curious.

Also genuinely curious: for those who've built r/place-style projects, what drove retention beyond the first day?