Similar Sites to OWOT

A list of YWOT clones listed on the now defunct Textwall

The logos for YWOT, OWOT and Textwall

Sites similar to OWOT, namely in being infinite canvases editable by anyone.

"The Three Sites"

Coined by Lemuria in Our World of News, "The Three Sites" refer to a triad of infinite canvases that are labeled as sister websites of one another.

These consist of Your World of Text and all other websites created by Andrew Badr, or run by prominent users of YWOT.

Most of the following sites were advertised at one time on the Center Console of YWOT.

Your World of Text

*See also: Your World of Text.

Possibly the first infinite canvas on the internet.

YWOT was created in 2009.

Our World of Pixels

*See also: Our World of Pixel.

YWOT but with pixels.

Launched by Eldit in 2016, hosted by InfraRaven.

Our World of Text

You are here.

The newer version of OWOT was launched by FP in 2017. It adds a variety of features to the base YWOT code, such as colors, a chatbox and teleportation.

Like OWOP, the new OWOT is also hosted by InfraRaven.

*Old OWOT

Created by Andrew Badr in 2010.

Largely identical to YWOT, except there was no rate limits.

Shut down in 2015 due to funding issues. Worlds from this version of OWOT can be found at Old Worlds.

Jotleaf's logo

*Jotleaf

Created by Andrew Badr in 2012.

Like YWOT and OWOT, Jotleaf was also an infinite canvas where users can write text. In addition to this, they could also add images, embed video/sound files and customize the background.

Jotleaf was also more focused on individual userpages, which users were encouraged to share like more conventional social media blogs.

The site was shut down in 2015 due to funding issues, but an example of a Jotleaf page can still be found at fornowband.org/.

FP once attempted to create a site named Uvias Vector, which would have been a blend of Jotleaf and Discord Jamboard. The project did not go anywhere, however.

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  Original Jotleaf Home Screen(October 12th, 2012)
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  Updated Jotleaf Home Screen(March 4th, 2013)
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  World settings
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  www.jotleaf.com/meowstic/big-fucking-furrie/ (November 2nd, 2015)
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  fornowband.org/, notice the images and playable sound files

Spooks.me

Spooks is an open world pixel game that is currently maintained by FP and InfraRaven, where users can customize their avatars and interact with other players.

It was initially created by a YWOT user named Kevin, though he abandoned the project in 2022.

The development of Spooks is heavily intertwined with both the OWOT and OWOP communities, and the site itself shares the same Uvias login system as the two aforementioned canvases. However it is not an infinite canvas, and as such will not be placed among "The Three Sites" despite being a sister website of OWOT.

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  Spooks mainpage in 2023
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  Spooks avatars by InfraRaven

OWOT Clones/Instances

*See also: Running from source.

OWOT is open source, meaning that many people have created their own instances of the site, some with significant modification.

Fern's Instance

Fern, a moderator of the OWOT Discord, briefly ran her own instance of OWOT.

Catha'vi/MothCultLeader's Instance

"Idea: a site like owot where everyone can make words but:

each character supports graphics as well as characters so images can be pasted at a higher resolution

there are "world portals" (areas that sync from a target world to other worlds) the homepage is mainly made up of these world portals, with users who are registered for longer getting larger portals

the portals are arranged semantically (can be achieved using embeddings and t-sne reduction) meaning similar worlds will be close together

the general vibe of worlds will be less editable, with them acting more like myspace sites/tumblr blogs

(wip)"

- Catha'vi on OWOT Discord

Currently nonexistent, though Catha'vi has created a thread in the Discord for users to suggest features for the hypothetical World of Text site.

Jan soweli Asike's Instance

*See also Jan soweli Asike#Custom OWOT client.

Other Canvas Sites Related to OWOT

Sites that are not considered sister websites of OWOT, but whose userbases have interacted with OWOT in the past.

Textwall.cc

*See also: Textwall.

Textwall was a 2020 OWOT clone where rather than having distinct URLs, worlds were located at specific coordinates on the Mainpage. The canvas also technically wasn't infinite, and was limited to 100,000 coordinates on all sides.

The site garnered a bad reputation for the sheer toxicity of its (predominantly underaged) userbase. However some Textwallers have since become well respected members of the OWOT community, with Lime being the most notable example.

Textwall was permanently shut down sometime in 2024, though the source code was public and FP was able to revive the site at 2s4.me. However it must be noted that this is an entirely new canvas without any content from the original Textwall.

Duckgroup.xyz

Supposedly an offshoot of textwall.cc, though information on it is sparse and it seemed to have been shut down long before the death of Textwall.

TextBoard.fr

*See also: Aywen Migration.

TextBoard.fr was a recreation of Your World of Text that was launched by French Youtuber Aywen as a social experiment. He made several videos about the site in December of 2024, prompting a massive incursion of French users primarily into YWOT, though some activity had also spilled into OWOT. The effect of this was that YWOT's spawn temporarily became a bilingual environment, and there was an increase in scripting in both WOT sites as Aywen's tech-inclined audience began to experiment with the text canvases. FP in particular was amazed at just how fast their scripts progressed.

TextBoard.fr is currently shut down, though Aywen has said that it may be brought back every year as a seasonal event.

Other Canvas Sites

Infinite canvas sites whose existences are generally unknown within the OWOT community. Some of them have been shut down, while others are simply too obscure to garner much attention.

Nevertheless, the following websites are significant for making great innovations to the infinite canvas format.

Written World

Written World was a 2011 YWOT clone whose canvas used a real world street map for its background. In addition to basic YWOT features, users were able to change their text colors and the direction they typed in(i.e. you could set it so that you typed downwards or backwards by default). The creator also assigned animations to actions like typing and deleting, intending to encourage "constructive participation" by making edits feel more engaging. Other utilities included an "echoing" feature that was "analogous to upvoting" and allowed users to "add permanence" to content they thought was good.

The site's main gimmick was that it took place on a real world street map generated using 250+ GBs of data from Planet OSM. Each user spawned in at their IRL locations and could use the UI to see other players in their proximity. The purpose of the experiment was to "combine online chat with the pre-existing relationships that are inherent to real-world places," as seen in instances where players used text to mark up IRL locations and curved their messages around the contours of streets and geography. The whole canvas gave off a personal feeling as users explored, commented and drew on what is essentially a digital version of the city they lived in, all while interacting with others who inhabited the same area.

Written World's geopositioning feature was initially restricted to New York, but the developer had planned to expand it to a greater area.

The site was created by Zack Shwartz as his Interactive Telecommunications Program thesis. Its central idea was previously conceived during a group project for Clay Shirky's Designing Conversational Spaces class.

Written World was shut down roughly one year after its launch, owing mostly to cost issues and the author's inexperience with programming.

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Walloftext.co

Walloftext.co was created by Louis Stowasser in 2014. It is a site where users type in draggable textboxes instead of on the canvas itself.

Walloftext.co presented itself as a site for note-taking and brainstorming, intending to forgo YWOT and OWOT's constant drama; I don't know how the developer went about trying to do this but it clearly didn't work.

Walloftext is one of the most obscure canvases featured here, most worlds(including /main) are rather empty.

*See also /the-making-of-wall-of-text-d95f63dada2d.

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Ascii Collab

Ascii collab is a lo-fi, art-centric text canvas founded by Martin Stewart in 2020. The site's purpose, as its name suggests, is for users to collaborate on making original ASCII art; copy-pasted content is strongly disincentivized.

The site has a very ingenious way of preventing spam. Users can click on a button to highlight each user's edits in different colors, and if they click on a patch of text in this mode then all edits by that user is instantly hidden, but only on their end. Similarly, the site owner can use this feature to revert text for everybody.

Though Ascii Collab is mostly obscure, Martin Stewart has implemented various measures to encourage collaboration among its meager userbase. First off, users can choose to have the site notify them on email whenever a new edit is made. A meet up service was also created to facilitate ASCII art sessions, and several events were held throughout 2021.

The area around the center of Ascii Collab is surrounded by a large rectangular border. On February 2nd, 2021, all art within this region was stitched into a massive poster, which can be seen below.

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3D cursor in typetobuild

Typetobuild.com(3D YWOT)

Typetobuild.com, also known as Anchored, was a 3D text canvas by SuperQGS where users could toggle their cursors to move horizontally or vertically. A later update made editing more intuitive by highlighting the layer of text you're on.

The canvas was infinite just like in YWOT and OWOT but had a vertical height limit. It was very sparse in content thanks to limited advertisement, but one YWOT user did make a road all the way to Y:1000. There was also a number of simple three dimensional ASCII drawings, which SuperQGS had stated to be an entirely new art form. Anchored was mostly identical to YWOT with the exception of the 3D aspect; it did not have teleportation or color, nor did it enable pasting to any capacity.

The beta for Anchored was released in April 2023 and taken offline later that same year, but the creator plans to revive it at some point in the future. In the meantime, you can find the source code here.

The developer discusses the inspiration behind typetobuild here. He had previously created an ASCII survival game named The After with YWOT/OWOT style base building, and intended to make a similar game set in typetobuild's 3D canvas.

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  SuperQGS on rendering the "/" character to better facilitate 3D ASCII art
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  SuperQGS on the planned survival mode
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  SuperQGS concerning the end of typetobuild.com
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  A user rotating the 3D canvas(Note: A script was used to increase the rendering distance)

Edit the Text

The website where Fern and Tap20 discovered OWOT.

Edit the Text(ETT) was an experimental, public text editor created by the Huang Twins. While it wasn't a canvas in the same way as OWOT, the fact that it could be edited by anyone gave rise to much of the same anarchic behavior that is found in the World of Text sites.

Fern recounts on the Discord how entire factions of trolls would wage war on the site's many pages, with there even being a cult-like organization in their midst. One of the most popular tactics was to overload pages with so many edits that they could no longer be loaded properly.

In the absence of any moderators, admins, or even rate limits, the ravages of trolls and griefers had to be counteracted by the efforts of individual users. Fern recalls participating in a full-on arms race to create scripts that could save and restore pages from spam scripts.

ETT was taken down in 2018 because the creators didn't want people to use it as a platform for storing their data.

A revival has since been created at tikolu.net/edit/.

Bonus: Mr.Guy's Chalkboard

To continue my study into the public canvas concept, I've purchased three small chalkboards and a box of chalk. I'm going to mount the chalkboards in public places and leave chalk with them and check back periodically to see what happens.

Not technically infinite.

Not technically a site either.

Mr.Guy once placed chalkboards in various social spaces as an experiment to replicate the OWOT canvas IRL.