skydex.online/live — the site finally has a center
Here's an honest observation about our own site: it had no center. The shell — the public half of skydex.online with the leaderboard, races, news, profiles — was a ring of pages around a hole. Every path eventually dumped you back on the storefront with the big Take off button, which is great when you want to fly and useless when you have two minutes and just want to see what's going on.
And there's a structural reason people need a "what's going on" surface here. In flight you're busy flying — the feed tab in the corner widget is glanceable, but you're not going to scroll it, heart things and open posts while threading a drone between cranes. The reading-and-reacting time is the other time: on pause, between sessions, on the site itself. That time needs one obvious page.
/live
Now it exists: skydex.online/live, first item in the site navigation. One stream, newest first, everything mixed: published flight moments and verified real-world aircraft sightings render as large photo cards — image, author, place, heart with its count; fresh buildings, rare vessel catches, new track records and world visits run between them as compact lines. Scroll down and it keeps loading history; stay at the top and it quietly refreshes itself.
Three filters, nothing clever: All is the default mix, Photos narrows to cards with actual images, Following shows only the people you follow. Hearts on the page like the real object — the same count you'd see on the moment's own page or on the building — one per person, toggle to undo, with the same little pop as everywhere else this week. Signed out you can read all of it; hearting asks you to sign in.
The page is deliberately kept out of search engines for now. A live feed with a young community can look thin on a bad day, and we'd rather grow it first — the moment it carries steady daily content, it gets indexed and joins the sitemap.
Pause opens the feed
The in-game side got its half of the deal: when you hit Esc and the world dims, the bottom-left widget now un-minimizes itself onto the feed tab. That widget was always there — the feed has been its default tab for weeks — but it was easy to leave collapsed and forget. Pause is exactly the moment you can read, scroll and react, so now the feed is simply present when that moment arrives. Un-pause and everything is where it was.
No second feed, no duplicate surfaces — one feed implementation drives the corner widget and the /live page alike. The site just finally has a front room.