The network links now unfurl as maps
Station pages and profiles got proper share cards earlier today. The network pages were still the odd ones out: paste a link to /adsb, /ais, either live map or either coverage map into a chat, and the preview was the generic site banner. It looked the same for aircraft and ships, and it showed nothing about the network the link was about.
Those links now unfurl as a map. The card is the coverage grid itself: every square where our volunteer receivers heard traffic in the last 30 days, lit over the coastlines. Brighter means busier. On the aircraft side a square is 0.5° and its value is how many one-minute sweeps found an aircraft there; on the water side a square is 0.1° and the value is how many AIS messages arrived. Along the bottom of the card are the same numbers the coverage page prints: squares, receivers, and either days of history (aircraft) or total AIS messages (ships). The aircraft card also names the countries with the most squares.
How it is framed. The card zooms to where the network actually hears. Today that is most of the world for aircraft and five harbours on three continents for ships. Five harbours at world scale are a few pixels each, so when the squares get that small each lit region gets a ring around it. A network with a single receiver zooms in to its own coast instead of showing a whole continent. Single stray squares (one garbled position decoded in the middle of an ocean) are still drawn, but they don't stretch the frame.
It stays current. The picture is drawn from the live grid, and the link carries a version that changes when the grid does. Chat apps that keep a preview forever will pick up the new map the next time someone shares the link.
The live maps get a live picture. /adsb/live and /ais/live don't use the 30-day grid. Their card is drawn from the same snapshot the page shows: every aircraft or vessel our receivers hear at that moment as a dot, the receivers themselves on their nearest city (never on the antenna), and the page's counters: contacts right now, receivers online, countries, and messages per second for aircraft or hulls over 30 days for ships. Anonymous private aircraft are plain grey dots with nothing attached, exactly as on the map. Ports with a lot of ship traffic get a glow that grows with the number of vessels, because at world scale a few hundred hulls in Sydney harbour are otherwise three pixels. The time is printed on the card in UTC, and a fresh picture is drawn every ten minutes.
Search engines get the numbers too. Both coverage pages now describe the grid as a dataset: what was measured, over which dates, over which part of the world, and where the raw JSON lives. The hubs point at the coverage picture as their main image, and the live maps at the live one.
Nothing about a single receiver appears on these cards. The grid is built from where the aircraft and ships were, not from where any antenna stands, and private aircraft are never recorded in it. If you run a receiver and want your own card, that is your station page.
The coverage maps themselves are at /adsb/coverage and /ais/coverage. If your area is dark on them, the feeder landing has the one line of config it takes to light it up.